My Rwandan Woman and Her Baby
Author: Mike Awoyinfa
Posted to the web: 7/9/2005 10:28:11 PM
As soon as Dele Olojede finished writing his story, he knew he had a classic in his hand: this strange story of a Rwandan mother caught amid a whirling vortex of love and hate for her only son born out of multiple rapes. He knew this was the defining story of his 16-and-a-half years reporting career at Newsday, a New York City tabloid, which calls itself the “respectable tabloid” and where he rose respectably to become Foreign Editor.“I knew that it would have a tremendous impact on anyone who was reading it,” Olojede told me. “Now, you could never guarantee that it would win any prize, but you always thought whether it wins a prize or not, this is a Pulitzer caliber story. “Because sometimes as a journalist when you write a story and the story is good, you know. Nobody needs to tell you. So, that was one of those stories.”As we sat talking, I tried to evoke the memory of Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer-winning shock story of a nine-year-old cocaine addict, which turned out to be a hoax, injuring the high reputation of the Washington Post and its legendary editor Ben Bradlee. Yes, Olojede agrees with me that there is a strange similarity between his story and Janet Cooke’s story. Except that his was real and hers was fake. Janet Cooke has since become an obloquy, a newsroom villain, stigmatized for concocting lies and disguising it as news and winning a Pulitzer Prize which was quickly withdrawn when she was found out.Laughing raucously and hilariously at the comparison, Olojede said: “It was more like the Janet Cooke story but real. Not virtual reality. It was a remarkable story. There is no way that you could write fiction like that. Nobody would believe it.” He could still picture the poor but beautiful Rwandan woman Alphoncina Mutuze as she told her agonizing story. It was the first time she was ever telling anyone the terrific tale locked intimately in her soul. And it was the first time her little boy would hear his own tragic life story, straight from her mum’s mouth: that he is not just a bastard, but a product of gang rapes inflicted on her mother in slave camps in the era of the genocide. “There would be times you would be interviewing her—I am interviewing this woman and my photographer is walking away, trying to make himself invisible and so on—and we would get to a particularly difficult subject and she would just hit a wall. And she can’t continue. And she would just be looking and staring. “Then she pressed her temples a lot. It was the first time she’d ever talked about this at length. She discussed various fragments of this with her counselors in the rape-counseling centers, but to tell the whole thing and the story of her life, this was her first time. “And she also told me that this was the first time that her son was hearing about this. I am looking at this cherubic face and wondering: how can this boy survive without being mentally damaged? Horrible, horrible story.” Olojede said he was compelled to go to Rwanda to report the tenth anniversary of the genocide out of a sense of guilt. Personal guilt. When the Rwandan genocide was unfolding in April of 1994, he was in South Africa covering the first democratic election that resulted in Mandela’s election as President. “Throughout that month and the preceding month, I had been covering the campaign. And then here is the month of April, and we started hearing this news that people were getting killed on a fairly large scale in Rwanda. “I was the only correspondent for Newsday in the whole of Africa. And I had to decide: Do I abandon this extraordinary moment that was about to occur in South Africa and go cover yet another story—people killing one another in Africa? “And I decided that I would stay in South Africa and see through what I had been covering. I had been covering it quite obsessively for several years and I did not want to abandon it.” As an African growing up and knowing the history of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, Olojede felt there was no way he could miss the big story of the new, free South Africa with Mandela going to be sworn in as its new President. “It was a big thing for us, especially if you are a Nigerian,” Olojede recalls. “And to be able to witness that to me was too alluring a possibility. And I really didn’t want to go to Rwanda at that point. “So I decided to stay and finish covering the South Africa election, the inauguration of Mandela and all that stuff. And it was only after that in July of ’94 that I found my way to Rwanda—just as the genocide was ending. And this huge river of refugees—two million people came surging across the border into Congo, into Goma in the Eastern Congo.
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