Zura Karuhimbi

It was 1994, in Musamo, a village in central Rwanda.

A Hutu widow lived there. Her name was Zura Karuhimbi. She was already old. No one knows exactly when she was born.

She came from a family of healers, and she was one too. People said she had magical powers.

She lived alone in a small two-room house. She farmed her field. Sometimes she took in lodgers.

That year, the genocide against the Tutsi began.

The Interahamwe militias carried out the massacres. Zura refused to join them.

She did the opposite. She opened her door.

Tutsi came to hide with her. Moderate Hutu. Twa. Burundians. Even three Europeans.

She also took in babies, found in the arms of mothers who had not survived.

There were more than a hundred of them. In the house. In the yard, under dry bean leaves and baskets. Perhaps also in a hole in the middle of her fields.

Later, she would say she had hidden so many that she did not know some of their names.

To keep the killers away, Zura played on the fear of spirits. People said she was possessed. She called on the Nyabingi spirits.

Zura rubbed her skin with herbs that stung. She put them on the walls of her house too. Anyone who touched her came away with irritated skin.

When the militiamen came near, she made noise. She banged dishes. She knocked stones together. She chanted words that sounded like spells.

She shook her arms, heavy with bracelets. She said the house was haunted.

She warned the killers: if they came in, they would be digging their own graves.

Militiamen offered her money. She refused.

Everyone who hid with her survived.

After the genocide, Zura explained that she was a practising Muslim. The witchcraft had only been a deterrent.

In 2006, President Paul Kagame awarded her the Campaign Against Genocide Medal.

She wore it almost all the time. At night, she slipped it under her pillow.

She remained poor, in the same house. A niece looked after her.

In Rwanda, she is counted among the indakemwa, the righteous. She is held up as an example of ubumuntu. This Rwandan word echoes Ubuntu without merging with it: it speaks of what makes us human.

In a video, she said simply:

Zura Karuhimbi died at home, in Musamo, on December 17, 2018.

She left behind a small two-room house. And more than a hundred people who walked out of it alive.