Special report: Rwanda - Sisters of mercy
Published Date: 29 June 2008
They were driven into prostitution as a result of the brutality and chaos of the genocide, but thanks to an initiative enabling them to become financially independent, the women of Rwanda are working towards a better future
RWANDA is famous for its mountain gorillas. For about £150, tourists can hire a guide and spend a day watching these impressive creatures in their natural habitat. For just £3, those same tourists can spend the night with a child prostitute in one of Kigali's many hotels that cater to the sex trade. Both the gorillas and the prostitutes are endangered species, but in very different ways.
When the virtue of a child can be sold for less than the cost of a packet of cigarettes, the word 'prostitution' seems inappropriate. A more apt term would be 'slavery'. As one former Rwandan sex slave confesses: "It's like signing a contract to be raped." The women and girls are enslaved by their circumstances. Choice is irrelevant, since they have none. Selling their bodies is essential in order to buy a few yams to feed themselves or their children.
Jamilah was 14 when her uncle raped her. Fearing, her parents would spurn her, she ran away and ended up living with a few friends – girls who had already turned to prostitution to survive. Jamilah soon followed their example. "Doing this work was not really a problem to me as I no longer had my purity, my uncle having already stolen it from me."
Her tale is a depressingly familiar one. The narrative often starts with a loving family and dreams for a prosperous future. "When I pictured the future," Monique recalls, "I always saw myself with a good job, a good husband that loved me, and plenty of happy children. I would imagine friends and neighbours coming to visit us at home, everybody eating and laughing heartily, everybody leaving happy."
Then comes a descent into hell, often as a consequence of rape at a tragically young age by a family member, employer or 'friend'. Rosa was repeatedly raped by her older brothers from the age of five. At 16 she was made pregnant by a neighbour. "I felt destroyed by the lack of love that I had been shown in the world," she says. The fact that such atrocities could occur reflects the place of women in Rwandan society.
For many other women, it was the genocide that put them on the path to prostitution. The nation of Rwanda is defined by the atrocities of 1994 when, in just three months, 85% of the minority Tutsi population was murdered in the Hutu version of the Final Solution. Estimates of the number of deaths range from 500,000 up to one million.
Furaha came from a stable, loving family. Since she never knew her father, she did not know if she was Tutsi or Hutu, but those intent on genocide – the génocidaires – did. They arrived brandishing machetes and hammers and, in the chaos of killing, Furaha, aged just ten, managed to escape. The following day she came across her badly wounded sister carrying another sister's baby boy. Both had been left for dead, but the sister had awoken the next morning amidst a sea of brutalised bodies. She found the baby sucking his dead mother's breast. She made her way to Burundi, but travelled back to Kigali after the war to stay with an aunt.
Tragically, the aunt died of Aids just a few months later, but Furaha decided to stay on, living with her aunt's family and working for her keep. In such an environment, however, the 14-year-old girl was seen as a cash cow, and the matriarch of the house sold her for just 20,000 francs (about £20) to a man interested in buying a virgin. She tried to fight him off, but he beat her, then raped her repeatedly. The following morning she fled with her small share of the transaction, but eventually returned, having nowhere else to go.
"I felt very hurt as this woman was the closest thing I had in the world to a parent. But, as I had no option, I had to accept the way of things. Within the space of three weeks, she had sold me on three occasions to three different men," says Furaha.
Another young girl, Dina, escaped the genocide by taking refuge in Amahoro Stadium, where so many Tutsis fled. For nearly three months she lived there amid starvation, disease and brutality. Soldiers from the Rwandan Patriotic Front, dispatched to the stadium to keep the Hutu butchers at bay, occasionally passed the time by raping refugees.
The génocidaires would quench their thirst for blood by launching lightning raids. "At night I would usually cover myself with the stinking, rotting bodies that lined the ground and smear their blood over my skin in order to be believed dead should the killers return, which they so often did."
After the war, believing her family dead, Dina took up with some girls she met in the stadium. She was 12 years old, working as a waitress in Kigali, earning at most 10,000 francs (£10) a month. Two years later, she befriended a fellow waitress twice her age, whom she looked on as a substitute mother. One day, she accompanied her on what seemed a routine errand to the house of a soldier. He managed to get her alone and forced her to have sex, threatening to kill her if she refused. "Before this time I knew nothing of sex and what he did to me caused me incredible pain," she says. It later dawned on her that "the girl I worked with had brought me to that house on purpose for me to get raped, a realisation which was as shocking as the rape itself".
Since the genocide, Rwanda has made enormous strides toward reconciliation and recovery. Rwandans seek admiration, not pity, and the period since 1994 is one dominated by success. As the British ambassador Nicholas Cannon told me, the country should be seen as an example of the resilience of the human spirit, not of the despair that so often defines Africa.
Women have figured prominently in this recovery. The constitution has been rewritten, with prominence given to gender equality, and legislation now requires that 32% of the candidates in any election must be female. In fact, the ratio of females in the parliament (47%) is now higher than in any country in the world. The government has formally recognised that discrimination against women is detrimental to economic development and domestic stability.
But Rwanda remains desperately poor, and wherever poverty exists, prostitution thrives. The per capita income in 2007 was 900, making Rwanda the 16th poorest country in the world. Since sending a child to school costs around 150 a year, many children go uneducated and consequently have few options when it comes to jobs. This is especially true for girls, for whom education is often seen as an unaffordable luxury. A random sample of Kigali prostitutes recently showed that the majority had not progressed past year three of primary school.
Dina, Rosa, Monique, Furaha, and Jamilah arrived at full-time prostitution from different paths but with the same degree of inevitability. "It did not seem as if I had much option," says Amina, another sex slave. "I saw that my life was pointless and that prostitution was my only way to survive. I knew of nowhere else I could go to find work." Like many of the others, she had a child to feed – her tiny baby would sleep quietly in a cot next to the bed where she worked.
"I think it is incredibly important for people to understand that being a prostitute is not a personal choice," Dina says. "It is only ever a direct result of the problems a girl or woman is facing."
Nassim, who once had a loving family, agrees. After she lost her two children in the genocide, then failed to get pregnant again, her husband began to beat her. She fled, became a prostitute and managed to rent a tiny house. "For a long time I had to sleep on the floor but I felt good because at least no one was beating me."
Selling her body for sex was a terrible means to a meagre end. It grew mundane for the simple reason that it had to be; thinking about it was just too painful. Brutal days blended into numb routine as Dina would close her mind to what she was doing by concentrating instead on the food it would buy her.
"While working I would think of the money," Amina echoes, "the money and nothing else." Others deadened their senses with alcohol or marijuana, even though they could barely afford them.
Clients came from many walks of life: foreign businessmen, school teachers, government ministers, soldiers and even the occasional priest. Policemen would arrest and beat a prostitute one day and buy her body the next. Clients paid as little as 3,000 francs (£3), seldom more than 10,000 (£10). Prices were kept low because supply was always high; there were simply too many desperate women chasing the same money. The best clients were those who finished fast then left; the bad ones were the drunks, or those who insisted on staying all night to get their money's worth. The very worst were the sadists who stole back their money, throwing in a beating for good measure.
Understandably, these women grew to hate men. "Personally, I doubt that there is any honest man in existence," says Dina. "I have hated and still do hate men. They have abused my trust time and again by not staying true to their word. The men with whom I have tried to build relationships were not honest people, and it was selfish, callous men that were responsible for the awful sexual abuses that I was forced to endure. I am not likely to ever put my trust in a man again."
Nassim agrees: "So many men have destroyed my trust throughout the course of my life – including my husband – and it is hard for me to think of men without remembering these certain individuals. I know that I will never fully trust or love or marry a man again."
Then there is Aids. Nassim, Rosa and Monique are all HIV-positive; the others can't quite understand why they are not. All carefully insist on using condoms, but sometimes the condom breaks; at other times it proves too expensive. Occasionally a client will refuse, threatening violence if he doesn't get his way. For the three women, contracting Aids seems a logical denouement to a life of dependable suffering. "I struggled to see how a god could even exist and yet have me suffer like I had," says Nassim.
Where is the point in a story of such utter hopelessness? Sadly, there's nothing terribly newsworthy in African despair. Misery without remedy can seem gratuitous, yet that is not the purpose of this story. For the seven women mentioned here share a common characteristic: they have all either left, or are determined to leave, prostitution. They fall into the privileged category of former slaves.
A few years ago, a Kenyan cleric named Joseph Ayienga started visiting the brothels of Kigali, urging women to attend prayer meetings in a mud hut. At first they were suspicious, fearing he was either a crank or a charlatan looking for free sex. But those who went discovered something very different from any religion they had previously encountered. Ayienga did not chastise them for their sins, nor did he offer vague promises of a better afterlife. He provided instead simple love, encouraging them to appreciate their own value as human beings. For many of the women, Pastor Joseph was the first man they had met in over a decade whom they felt they could trust. "It was the first time in my life that I was able to talk to a man and feel good in his presence," says Rosa.
The love of God would not, however, have been enough by itself to enable an escape from sex slavery. Love could not pay the rent and feed their babies. What distinguishes Ayienga's effort at redemption from so many other attempts to offer salvation is that it has an intensely practical side. The practicality comes from Jared Miller, who combines the devotion of a missionary with the hard business sense of an entrepreneur.
Miller, who hails from Tennessee, honed his skills in the Nashville music industry as a promoter and manager. He also runs a private equity firm of marketing consultants, often providing pro bono advice to African relief agencies. In 2006, he joined up with Ayienga, raising around 55,000 among friends and family. The prostitutes were astonished to see a white man acting as translator for Ayienga – that alone made Miller seem special. During their first year together, their organisation, called Sisters of Rwanda, helped 23 women and their children. Today, the group has 103 women and 242 children registered.
Sisters of Rwanda's focus is to help women escape from sex slavery. It ensures the women know how to look after themselves and their children, and that they have access to medicines and treatment. It provides education to help break the cycle of poverty by giving the women the schooling they missed and ensuring their children are not similarly deprived. And it enables economic development – Miller's forte. He wants to make Sisters of Rwanda financially independent by engaging the women in useful employment from which they will also gain a sense of self-worth. Central to this effort is the recently launched KEZA brand – a line of handmade jewellery designed to be sold to high-end customers who want to show off their fashion sense and their social conscience.
The final aspect is the most ambitious. Sisters of Rwanda strives for a fundamental social revolution, one that will break the cycle of tolerance for sex slavery and violence against women. The organisation has lobbied the Rwandan parliament for laws criminalising the demand side of prostitution, punishing clients rather than the victims. Central to this is the Ubuntu Revolution, which aims to educate Rwandan men about a simple truth, namely that violence against women, quite apart from being unjust, is inimical to domestic stability and economic growth. In other words, the revolution is not simply about being nice to women. It is about creating a stable society.
There is no better time for a revolution like this. The high percentage of female representatives in the Rwandan parliament means the government is already sympathetic to gender-based reform. The government is also actively trying to promote the idea of Rwanda as a progressive nation, a beacon of hope in central Africa. It is painfully aware that rampant sex slavery does not fit well with that image.
Miller is determined to end sex slavery in Rwanda and then to spread that revolution across Africa. He has plans for a beauty school with major corporate sponsorship and is putting together a conference to coincide with the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, backed by the United Nations, MTV and a gaggle of corporate heavyweights. An activist dynamo, Miller combines old-fashioned humanity with modern-day marketing.
"I absolutely love what I'm doing," he says. "This is living the dream. I wouldn't have it any other way – except for us to have more operating funds."
On that score, things are looking good. Since its launch just over a month ago, KEZA has brought in more money than was collected during the three previous months of intensive fundraising. But what really matters is that the sisters are doing it for themselves.
Virginia, the first person to enter the programme, considers herself the happiest person alive. Asked why, she explains: "Because I am no longer seen as a prostitute. I am known as a successful mother."
Today, Sisters of Rwanda carries out its work at the Treasure Centre, a secure refuge just across from Amahoro Stadium, where so many of its members first discovered despair. Many of the sisters still have to sell their bodies because they have no other way to make money. But they do so with a different attitude.
"I am a changed person now," says Monique. "I look nice and behave well and I am loved. I wish I could be given a better house or at least one with a door but I do not dwell on these things too much. I look instead at the fellowship I have with other people and I realise that finally I have come to see the treasure that is just being alive."
Gerard DeGroot is a professor of modern history at the University of St Andrews. He was recently the keynote speaker at a UN-sponsored conference on gender-based violence, held in Kigali. His latest book is The Sixties Unplugged (£20, Macmillan). For more information on Sisters of Rwanda and KEZA jewellery, visit www.sistersofrwanda.org.
When the virtue of a child can be sold for less than the cost of a packet of cigarettes, the word 'prostitution' seems inappropriate. A more apt term would be 'slavery'. As one former Rwandan sex slave confesses: "It's like signing a contract to be raped." The women and girls are enslaved by their circumstances. Choice is irrelevant, since they have none. Selling their bodies is essential in order to buy a few yams to feed themselves or their children.
Jamilah was 14 when her uncle raped her. Fearing, her parents would spurn her, she ran away and ended up living with a few friends – girls who had already turned to prostitution to survive. Jamilah soon followed their example. "Doing this work was not really a problem to me as I no longer had my purity, my uncle having already stolen it from me."
Her tale is a depressingly familiar one. The narrative often starts with a loving family and dreams for a prosperous future. "When I pictured the future," Monique recalls, "I always saw myself with a good job, a good husband that loved me, and plenty of happy children. I would imagine friends and neighbours coming to visit us at home, everybody eating and laughing heartily, everybody leaving happy."
Then comes a descent into hell, often as a consequence of rape at a tragically young age by a family member, employer or 'friend'. Rosa was repeatedly raped by her older brothers from the age of five. At 16 she was made pregnant by a neighbour. "I felt destroyed by the lack of love that I had been shown in the world," she says. The fact that such atrocities could occur reflects the place of women in Rwandan society.
For many other women, it was the genocide that put them on the path to prostitution. The nation of Rwanda is defined by the atrocities of 1994 when, in just three months, 85% of the minority Tutsi population was murdered in the Hutu version of the Final Solution. Estimates of the number of deaths range from 500,000 up to one million.
Furaha came from a stable, loving family. Since she never knew her father, she did not know if she was Tutsi or Hutu, but those intent on genocide – the génocidaires – did. They arrived brandishing machetes and hammers and, in the chaos of killing, Furaha, aged just ten, managed to escape. The following day she came across her badly wounded sister carrying another sister's baby boy. Both had been left for dead, but the sister had awoken the next morning amidst a sea of brutalised bodies. She found the baby sucking his dead mother's breast. She made her way to Burundi, but travelled back to Kigali after the war to stay with an aunt.
Tragically, the aunt died of Aids just a few months later, but Furaha decided to stay on, living with her aunt's family and working for her keep. In such an environment, however, the 14-year-old girl was seen as a cash cow, and the matriarch of the house sold her for just 20,000 francs (about £20) to a man interested in buying a virgin. She tried to fight him off, but he beat her, then raped her repeatedly. The following morning she fled with her small share of the transaction, but eventually returned, having nowhere else to go.
"I felt very hurt as this woman was the closest thing I had in the world to a parent. But, as I had no option, I had to accept the way of things. Within the space of three weeks, she had sold me on three occasions to three different men," says Furaha.
Another young girl, Dina, escaped the genocide by taking refuge in Amahoro Stadium, where so many Tutsis fled. For nearly three months she lived there amid starvation, disease and brutality. Soldiers from the Rwandan Patriotic Front, dispatched to the stadium to keep the Hutu butchers at bay, occasionally passed the time by raping refugees.
The génocidaires would quench their thirst for blood by launching lightning raids. "At night I would usually cover myself with the stinking, rotting bodies that lined the ground and smear their blood over my skin in order to be believed dead should the killers return, which they so often did."
After the war, believing her family dead, Dina took up with some girls she met in the stadium. She was 12 years old, working as a waitress in Kigali, earning at most 10,000 francs (£10) a month. Two years later, she befriended a fellow waitress twice her age, whom she looked on as a substitute mother. One day, she accompanied her on what seemed a routine errand to the house of a soldier. He managed to get her alone and forced her to have sex, threatening to kill her if she refused. "Before this time I knew nothing of sex and what he did to me caused me incredible pain," she says. It later dawned on her that "the girl I worked with had brought me to that house on purpose for me to get raped, a realisation which was as shocking as the rape itself".
Since the genocide, Rwanda has made enormous strides toward reconciliation and recovery. Rwandans seek admiration, not pity, and the period since 1994 is one dominated by success. As the British ambassador Nicholas Cannon told me, the country should be seen as an example of the resilience of the human spirit, not of the despair that so often defines Africa.
Women have figured prominently in this recovery. The constitution has been rewritten, with prominence given to gender equality, and legislation now requires that 32% of the candidates in any election must be female. In fact, the ratio of females in the parliament (47%) is now higher than in any country in the world. The government has formally recognised that discrimination against women is detrimental to economic development and domestic stability.
But Rwanda remains desperately poor, and wherever poverty exists, prostitution thrives. The per capita income in 2007 was 900, making Rwanda the 16th poorest country in the world. Since sending a child to school costs around 150 a year, many children go uneducated and consequently have few options when it comes to jobs. This is especially true for girls, for whom education is often seen as an unaffordable luxury. A random sample of Kigali prostitutes recently showed that the majority had not progressed past year three of primary school.
Dina, Rosa, Monique, Furaha, and Jamilah arrived at full-time prostitution from different paths but with the same degree of inevitability. "It did not seem as if I had much option," says Amina, another sex slave. "I saw that my life was pointless and that prostitution was my only way to survive. I knew of nowhere else I could go to find work." Like many of the others, she had a child to feed – her tiny baby would sleep quietly in a cot next to the bed where she worked.
"I think it is incredibly important for people to understand that being a prostitute is not a personal choice," Dina says. "It is only ever a direct result of the problems a girl or woman is facing."
Nassim, who once had a loving family, agrees. After she lost her two children in the genocide, then failed to get pregnant again, her husband began to beat her. She fled, became a prostitute and managed to rent a tiny house. "For a long time I had to sleep on the floor but I felt good because at least no one was beating me."
Selling her body for sex was a terrible means to a meagre end. It grew mundane for the simple reason that it had to be; thinking about it was just too painful. Brutal days blended into numb routine as Dina would close her mind to what she was doing by concentrating instead on the food it would buy her.
"While working I would think of the money," Amina echoes, "the money and nothing else." Others deadened their senses with alcohol or marijuana, even though they could barely afford them.
Clients came from many walks of life: foreign businessmen, school teachers, government ministers, soldiers and even the occasional priest. Policemen would arrest and beat a prostitute one day and buy her body the next. Clients paid as little as 3,000 francs (£3), seldom more than 10,000 (£10). Prices were kept low because supply was always high; there were simply too many desperate women chasing the same money. The best clients were those who finished fast then left; the bad ones were the drunks, or those who insisted on staying all night to get their money's worth. The very worst were the sadists who stole back their money, throwing in a beating for good measure.
Understandably, these women grew to hate men. "Personally, I doubt that there is any honest man in existence," says Dina. "I have hated and still do hate men. They have abused my trust time and again by not staying true to their word. The men with whom I have tried to build relationships were not honest people, and it was selfish, callous men that were responsible for the awful sexual abuses that I was forced to endure. I am not likely to ever put my trust in a man again."
Nassim agrees: "So many men have destroyed my trust throughout the course of my life – including my husband – and it is hard for me to think of men without remembering these certain individuals. I know that I will never fully trust or love or marry a man again."
Then there is Aids. Nassim, Rosa and Monique are all HIV-positive; the others can't quite understand why they are not. All carefully insist on using condoms, but sometimes the condom breaks; at other times it proves too expensive. Occasionally a client will refuse, threatening violence if he doesn't get his way. For the three women, contracting Aids seems a logical denouement to a life of dependable suffering. "I struggled to see how a god could even exist and yet have me suffer like I had," says Nassim.
Where is the point in a story of such utter hopelessness? Sadly, there's nothing terribly newsworthy in African despair. Misery without remedy can seem gratuitous, yet that is not the purpose of this story. For the seven women mentioned here share a common characteristic: they have all either left, or are determined to leave, prostitution. They fall into the privileged category of former slaves.
A few years ago, a Kenyan cleric named Joseph Ayienga started visiting the brothels of Kigali, urging women to attend prayer meetings in a mud hut. At first they were suspicious, fearing he was either a crank or a charlatan looking for free sex. But those who went discovered something very different from any religion they had previously encountered. Ayienga did not chastise them for their sins, nor did he offer vague promises of a better afterlife. He provided instead simple love, encouraging them to appreciate their own value as human beings. For many of the women, Pastor Joseph was the first man they had met in over a decade whom they felt they could trust. "It was the first time in my life that I was able to talk to a man and feel good in his presence," says Rosa.
The love of God would not, however, have been enough by itself to enable an escape from sex slavery. Love could not pay the rent and feed their babies. What distinguishes Ayienga's effort at redemption from so many other attempts to offer salvation is that it has an intensely practical side. The practicality comes from Jared Miller, who combines the devotion of a missionary with the hard business sense of an entrepreneur.
Miller, who hails from Tennessee, honed his skills in the Nashville music industry as a promoter and manager. He also runs a private equity firm of marketing consultants, often providing pro bono advice to African relief agencies. In 2006, he joined up with Ayienga, raising around 55,000 among friends and family. The prostitutes were astonished to see a white man acting as translator for Ayienga – that alone made Miller seem special. During their first year together, their organisation, called Sisters of Rwanda, helped 23 women and their children. Today, the group has 103 women and 242 children registered.
Sisters of Rwanda's focus is to help women escape from sex slavery. It ensures the women know how to look after themselves and their children, and that they have access to medicines and treatment. It provides education to help break the cycle of poverty by giving the women the schooling they missed and ensuring their children are not similarly deprived. And it enables economic development – Miller's forte. He wants to make Sisters of Rwanda financially independent by engaging the women in useful employment from which they will also gain a sense of self-worth. Central to this effort is the recently launched KEZA brand – a line of handmade jewellery designed to be sold to high-end customers who want to show off their fashion sense and their social conscience.
The final aspect is the most ambitious. Sisters of Rwanda strives for a fundamental social revolution, one that will break the cycle of tolerance for sex slavery and violence against women. The organisation has lobbied the Rwandan parliament for laws criminalising the demand side of prostitution, punishing clients rather than the victims. Central to this is the Ubuntu Revolution, which aims to educate Rwandan men about a simple truth, namely that violence against women, quite apart from being unjust, is inimical to domestic stability and economic growth. In other words, the revolution is not simply about being nice to women. It is about creating a stable society.
There is no better time for a revolution like this. The high percentage of female representatives in the Rwandan parliament means the government is already sympathetic to gender-based reform. The government is also actively trying to promote the idea of Rwanda as a progressive nation, a beacon of hope in central Africa. It is painfully aware that rampant sex slavery does not fit well with that image.
Miller is determined to end sex slavery in Rwanda and then to spread that revolution across Africa. He has plans for a beauty school with major corporate sponsorship and is putting together a conference to coincide with the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, backed by the United Nations, MTV and a gaggle of corporate heavyweights. An activist dynamo, Miller combines old-fashioned humanity with modern-day marketing.
"I absolutely love what I'm doing," he says. "This is living the dream. I wouldn't have it any other way – except for us to have more operating funds."
On that score, things are looking good. Since its launch just over a month ago, KEZA has brought in more money than was collected during the three previous months of intensive fundraising. But what really matters is that the sisters are doing it for themselves.
Virginia, the first person to enter the programme, considers herself the happiest person alive. Asked why, she explains: "Because I am no longer seen as a prostitute. I am known as a successful mother."
Today, Sisters of Rwanda carries out its work at the Treasure Centre, a secure refuge just across from Amahoro Stadium, where so many of its members first discovered despair. Many of the sisters still have to sell their bodies because they have no other way to make money. But they do so with a different attitude.
"I am a changed person now," says Monique. "I look nice and behave well and I am loved. I wish I could be given a better house or at least one with a door but I do not dwell on these things too much. I look instead at the fellowship I have with other people and I realise that finally I have come to see the treasure that is just being alive."
Gerard DeGroot is a professor of modern history at the University of St Andrews. He was recently the keynote speaker at a UN-sponsored conference on gender-based violence, held in Kigali. His latest book is The Sixties Unplugged (£20, Macmillan). For more information on Sisters of Rwanda and KEZA jewellery, visit www.sistersofrwanda.org.
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