How Do You Forgive the People Who Killed Your Family?

Hussein Longolongo killed seven people during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda; he oversaw the killing of nearly 200 others.

He told me this on a warm March day in a courtyard in central Kigali, almost exactly 30 years later. I had come to Rwanda because I wanted to understand how the genocide is remembered—through the country’s official memorials as well as in the minds of victims. And I wanted to know how people like Longolongo look back on what they did.

Longolongo was born in Kigali in the mid-1970s. As a teenager in the late 1980s, he didn’t feel any personal hatred toward Tutsi. He had friends who were Tutsi; his own mother was Tutsi. But by the early 1990s, extremist Hutu propaganda had started to spread in newspapers and on the radio, radicalizing Rwandans. Longolongo’s older brother tried to get him to join a far-right Hutu political party, but Longolongo wasn’t interested in politics. He just wanted to continue his studies.

On April 6, 1994, Longolongo attended a funeral for a Tutsi man. At about 8:30 p.m., in the midst of the funeral rituals, the sky erupted in red fire and black smoke. The news traveled fast: A plane carrying the Rwandan president, Juvénal Habyarimana, and the Burundian president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, had been shot down over Kigali. No one survived.

Responsibility for the attack has never been conclusively determined. Some have speculated that Hutu extremists shot down the plane; others have blamed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi military group that had been fighting Hutu government forces near the Ugandan border. Whoever was behind it, the event gave Hutu militants a pretext for the massacre of Tutsi. The killing started that night.