Tea Talk on Genocide by Éloge Butera

Tuesday, February 1st, we had yet another opportunity to share our evening with a unique guest for a tea talk. Éloge Butera, a survivor of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda shared his experiences during the genocide in a captivating 2 hour conversation over tea. Éloge who is also a human rights activist was chosen by the Quebec Government as "young volunteer of the year" in recognition of his activities organizing and speaking at conferences and commemorative days about genocide and human rights to raise public awareness, as well as fundraising for Rwandan charity organizations. 

Éloge started his talk by taking us through a short journey into his childhood days. The set of photographs from his life that he had brought with him made the narrative all the more touching & personal. The richness of the narrative also came from the amorphous style which Éloge chose to tell his story – a style that seamlessly integrated the socio-political developments that took place in Rwanda prior to the genocide with the changes in everyday life that Éloge & his family went through. 

We learnt of his early childhood & the discrimination that the Tutsi kids faced in their school because of the propaganda against the Tutsis that had started to play a dominant role in the Rwandan society during the 1980s. We learnt of his parents & how they fought through their lives constantly facing the agony & tension that the social divide had stirred up. The silence in the room was ear-shattering to say the least when Éloge was reliving the moments where he & his family witnessed first-hand the desperate conditions that thousands of Rwandans went through during the genocide which wiped out nearly 20% of the country’s population. Éloge also talked about the origin of the Tutsi – Hutu divide & how a short-sighted classification of Rwandan population based on their facial features eventually led to a deep divide & enmity between the two groups. 

Éloge’s father who was a doctor had previously treated & cured several people with injuries whom the rest of the medical community had forsaken. On several occasions during the genocide, Éloge’s family was saved only because the person standing in front of them to take their lives happened to be someone who was previously saved by Éloge’s father. While the sense of gratitude displayed by such men who were otherwise comfortable taking human lives around them was somewhat a symbol of hope, Éloge’s loss of his father during the genocide brought us face-to-face with the hopelessness that such times can cast upon the world. 

After the genocide, Éloge’s family sent him to Canada. Éloge shared during his talk the early experiences that he had in Manitoba, Winnipeg & how he eventually came to Montreal where he is now finishing his law degree. Incidentally, Éloge was also a Sauvé Scholar during 2009-10 which made the connection that he shared with us much stronger.