Rwanda Genocide Survivor shares experience with students

Global Certificate students were joined last week by our second guest speaker of the year. Francois Musonera is currently a Spanish teacher at Beaver Dam High School, but took the time to join our students at MHS to share some historical background and his life experiences growing up in Rwanda.

The presentation was very informative as Mr. Musonera began giving the students a brief cultural history of Rwanda. The Indigenous population known as the Twa were the first inhabitants of what is today Rwanda. Mr. Musonera described how the Hutu ethnic group migrated into the region hundreds of years ago followed by the Tutsi who overtook the Hutu and established a monarchy style government. The Hutu were essentially oppressed and enslaved for about 400 years by the Tutsi (Not the same type of slavery system used her in the United States during the 17th through 19th centuries). This time period was followed by Colonization by the Germans and Belgians and eventually independence in the mid 1900s.

During independence there was some tension between the leadership of the different ethnic groups as Tutsi leaders wanted government control rather than the Hutus. However despite that tension, Mr. Musonera described his childhood as very peaceful and a peacful time throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

When the President of Rwanda was killed in an attack that shot down his airplane the violence within the country began. President Juvenal Habyarimana was an ethnic Hutu, and when he was killed the Hutu majority blamed the Tutsi minority for the assassination. Armed militia and civilians began targeting Tutsi civilians afraid that the Tutsi wanted control and would return to the oppressive dominance they once held.

Mr. Musonera, whose family is ethnically mixed talked about the feeling he was targeted by everyone. Hutu groups accused him of looking like a Tutsi, and Tutsis believed he was Hutu which got him in some scary situations more than once. Mr. Musonera described his escape to the country of Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo), then to Senegal where he was put on a list of refugees to be relocated to the United States where he was sent to Platteville, WI.

After arriving in Platteville, Mr. Musonera gave descriptions of his experience trying to adjust to the rural community in the United States and the cultural challenges as he did not even speak English. However after meeting friends at church, and getting a job at UW-Platteville's food service he learned English, American cultural norms and eventually became a student at UW-Platteville where he studied Spanish and got his degree to be a spanish teacher.

More details were shared at the presentation and for those interested in Mr. Musonera's story he did write a book called Surviving the Genocide that was referenced in a previous blog entry. His books are available for purchase online or students at Mukwonago High School can check the book out from our school library where they can learn more specific details and experiences of Mr. Musonera and his journey from peaceful Rwanda, surviving the genocide and adapting to American culture here in the United States.