In March 2008, a few weeks before the commemoration, I wrote a collection of poetry on Genocide. Entitled Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, its raison d’etre remains one of my personal motivations to writing more about Rwanda and the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in particular. Today, I am pleased to share one of the 21 poems that define it — and I hope this one piece needs no explanation:
The Silence of Jehovah
Day and night they precipitated. Any Tutsi alive. Into the bottom of the pit. Their greatest ambition. Men and women, boys and girls; and even babies — plus those in the womb.
The killer did everything they could. Jehovah just kept silence.
Today you see; women live with HIV, infected by the villains — who did the necessary. But Jehovah just kept silence.
He really kept silence.
Hundreds of thousands — more than a million — of people perished. He kept silence. As if nothing was happening. Nothing at all.
But believe that one day, He will speak up; say something. Something even stronger. Stronger than what he would say at that time.
He won’t snow forever.
