One such masterpiece is the song 'Ese Mbaze nde?' ('Who Can I Ask?') composed in early 1996, a year and a half after the Genocide Against the Tutsi had ended.
It is not simply a song; it is a cry, a scream through melody, a lamentation rooted in the language of exile and anguish.
It is a spiritual reckoning with the ungraspable: how does a person live after death has passed so close and so thoroughly?
Only a few artists in the world have ever captured such depths of human tragedy with such nonphysical precision. Mariya Yohana Mukankuranga is one; Nyiranyamibwa is the other.
Both women, now octogenarians, are custodians of memory. In her lyrics, Suzanne doesn’t just speak about survivors; she speaks as the survivor.
She embodies them. Her voice rises with their pain, and sinks with their loneliness. Her art is sacred.
The flute that opens “Ese Mbaze nde?” is not ornamental. It is the sound of loneliness, of a silence so deep it makes the trees weep.
And when Nyiranyamibwa begins with the elongated cry, “Ayiiii!” followed by “Ngire nte?” (“How and what can I do?”), it is not a rhetorical question. It is a question thrown into the void.
In Rwandan tradition, “Ngire nte?” was the second question in a divinatory ritual, meant to help the sufferer discover what sin or misfortune had brought about calamity.
But for the survivor of genocide, there is no diviner, no answer, and no one to ask.
'Ese Mbaze nde?' â” Who can I ask? Who remains to be my mirror, to bear witness to my loss? The answer is immediate and gut-wrenching: “Uwo nabajije atakiriho” â” The one I should ask is no longer here.
In one breath, Suzanne reminds us that genocide is not only the destruction of lives, but the obliteration of continuity.
The murder of grandparents, parents, and children is not only physical. It is genealogical.
A child grows up with no picture of their mother, no memory of their father’s voice, no village to return to.
“I enter Rwanda and no longer recognize anything,
It’s as if its heart has been torn out.
I’m dazed, disoriented, as if emptied of meaning,
Then my chest tightens as if I were breastfeeding but I’m not, ayiweeeee.”
This stanza, drawn from deep spiritual trauma, is a psalm of dislocation. A woman who had fled in exile returns to find a Rwanda that resembles a body with no soul. It is a corpse of a country.
The metaphor of a breast tightening though not breastfeeding evokes phantom painâ”a mourning of what should have been: children to hold, to feed, to raise. The pain lingers, even in absence.
'When I came out, there were no birds⦠There was sunshine and the stench of death.'
These are the words of a survivor quoted in the introduction of a book Leave None to Tell the Story, a title borrowed from the genocidaires’ own terrifying boast: 'Ntihazagire n’uwo kubara inkuru.'â”'Leave none to tell the story.'
It was not just a threat; it was an instructionâ”an apocalyptic order to erase an entire people and ensure silence.
It is in that scorched silence that genocide denial aggravates. And those who deny the genocide against the Tutsi, or who minimize its gravity, are not merely mistakenâ”they are complicit.
They are grave-diggers in another sense: they bury truth.
Suzanne Nyiranyamibwa’s powerful 1996 lament, 'Ese Mbaze Nde?' ('Who Can I Ask?'), echoes through the ashes of a people nearly annihilated.
She returned to Rwanda after the genocide and found a place unrecognizable: hills once alive now quieted by massacre, churches transformed into charnel houses, paths overgrown as though ashamed to lead anywhere.
Her song asks what every survivor has silently screamed: Where do I go with this grief?
Who is left to answer? And now, even as survivors sing, we find voicesâ”scholars, bloggers, YouTubers, exiles like Jambo Asbl, Christine Coleman, Claude Gatebuke or Gaspar Musabyimanaâ”who twist the facts, ridicule the pain, and cloak hatred in intellectual varnish.
They, too, would wish to leave none to tell the storyâ”not with machetes, but with falsehoods.
There is no moral distance between the hand that wields the blade and the mouth that justifies its swing.
Nyiranyamibwa’s song transitions from personal lament to collective eulogy:
“All the paths have been invaded by the bushland,
The beautiful hills of yesteryear are now covered with ruins,
Where the children used to play, vultures are now chillers, ayiii.”
This is poetry born of horror. The metaphor of the land itself decaying parallels the withering of communal life.
The beloved Rwanda of memory is swallowed by overgrown bushes and haunted by scavengers. Hills that once echoed with children’s laughter now echo with cries of orphans.
“The crying of the orphans will keep you awake,
The mother who gave birth is forever reduced to a life without children.
So many widows are sick with their unspeakable grief, ayiiiiii.”
To those who survived, the world is not silent. It is filled with cries that pierce the night. Grief has become a second skin.
A mother without children is an empty vessel, a universe collapsed into silence. An orphan with no one to call “Mama” or “Papa” is a thread torn from the fabric of ancestry.
Nyiranyamibwa doesn’t shy away from the grotesque reality of the genocide:
“God’s churches are overflowing with corpses,
The country is swarming with mines,
When you survive the night, you’re never sure you’ll survive the day, ayiweeee.”
It is a theology of abandonment. The sanctuaries became slaughterhouses. Places meant for prayer became tombs.
The listener can feel the despair of someone who questions even the basic rhythm of time: night and day, safety and danger.
Nothing can be trusted. This is what it means to survive trauma: waking up is a betrayal of those who did not.
Nyiranyamibwa turns the focus sharply to the evil that was unleashed:
“They drove human beings like they were beasts,
Leading them to their death, these villains
Having decreed that being Tutsi is an absolute crime, ayiweeee.”
The song reminds us that the crime of genocide is not simply the act of killing. It is the redefinition of a person as a problem to be solved by death.
The Tutsi were dehumanized, turned into an infection to be purged. Nyiranyamibwa reminds us of the cruelty with which this ideology was carried out:
“Any Hutu who didn’t kill didn’t deserve to live,
Declared an accomplice of the Inkotanyi, he deserved to die,
Few in his family have escaped death.”
This rhyme dismantles the false binary often peddled by genocide deniers: that it was a war. It was not.
It was a meticulously planned extermination, so complete in its cruelty that even dissenters from the killing side were declared enemies.
“They (the killers) had fun at their expense while they were only clothed in shame.
They dispossessed them of everything on the hills,
It was like the Way of the Cross to Golgotha.”
The use of Christian imagery, though not really accurate, is deliberate. Rwanda, seen as a deeply religious country, saw its churches turned into Golgothas.
Nyiranyamibwa evokes the crucifixion as a way to depict the collective suffering of the Tutsiâ”humiliated, stripped of dignity, paraded toward death.
“Anyone not killed with the machete perished by a small, worn-out hoe,
You had to pay to get killed with a bullet,
If you didn’t buy your death, you were cut up into pieces
It was unthinkable, no one could ever have imagined it.”
To pay for a bullet was considered a mercyâ”instead of being killed with a machete.
What does it say about a world where the price of a humane death becomes a privilege? This song carries these realities with brutal honesty.
And Nyiranyamibwa, having seen it, returns to Belgium after 1994 carrying not just her own grief but that of over a million.
Her father, Phillip Karahamuheto, was killed in the 1963 anti-Tutsi pogroms. She had lived genocide before genocide.
She was already mourning before 1994. Hers is a generational grief. And yet, she does not end in hatred.
Suzanne Nyiranyamibwa ends her song not with vengeance, but with a profound callâ”a pleaâ”to 'fight hatred and resentment.'
It is an act of courage to ask a shattered world to heal. But healing cannot coexist with denial.
And those who deny the Genocide against the Tutsiâ”or dress up that denial in euphemism, revisionism, and false balanceâ”inflict a second death upon the victims and a fresh wound upon the survivors.
'Leave None to Tell the Story’ was not just a documentation of atrocitiesâ”it was a prophetic indictment.
The genocidaires did not merely aim to kill people; they aimed to kill memory. That is why they desecrated bodies, crushed skulls, burned homes, and incinerated identity cards.
That is why they chased pregnant women and infants. That is why they planned it in schools, in government offices, in churches.
And that is why the title of the book stings: because survivors emerged from the graveyards alone, with no one left to ask, 'Who were my parents? Where is my brother buried?
Did anyone see my sister’s face before she was taken?' Nyiranyamibwa gave voice to that cry: 'Ese mbaze nde?'
Humanity must not entertain those who feign objectivity while playing host to denial. The world must not excuse ignorance that becomes ideology.
Any sane person must not allow memory to be murdered a second time.
To deny genocideâ”or to forget it, is to complete the mission of the killers.
To distort truth is to swing the same macheteâ”only now, at truth, at justice, and at the dignity of survivors.
There is no innocence in silence.
This is the principle of the survivor: not settling scores, but resistance through truth. This is moral clarity.
Survivors are not asking for pity; they are commanding remembrance. They are not asking for vengeance; they are demanding accountability and justice.
Nyiranyamibwa’s lament is not unique to her. It belongs to thousands who survived. Thousands who came out of hiding to find no one left.
Who looked for the path home and found it overgrown. Who waited to hear the voice of a loved one and heard only silence.
Children who now have no family name to pass on. Men and women who carry trauma in their bones.
The cry “Ngire nte?” must echo through every Rwandan conscience. What do we do with this past? How do we honour it without being swallowed by it? How do we make “Never Again” more than a slogan?
Nyiranyamibwa’s song feels like it inspired that title “Leave None to Tell the Story,”. She sings because there are some left to tell the story. She sings so we listen.
Rwanda must never forget. The world must never forget. For if we do, we return to the abyss.
Nyiranyamibwa sings not only to the past but also to the future. Her cry is not only retrospective; it is far-sighted.
There are survivors today who still don’t know where their families are buried. Who don’t know the faces of their mothers, the voices of their fathers, or the smell of their homes.
There are children born from rape, now grown, who ask, “Ese mbaze nde?” There are orphans who have become parents without ever being parented themselves. There are souls still wandering the ruins of memory.
To sing is to defy oblivion. To remember is to heal. To grieve together is to rebuild what was meant to be destroyed.
Nyiranyamibwa’s voice, cracked by time and grief, remains the most authentic sound of Rwanda’s conscience. May it echo through our politics, the churches and mosques, our classrooms, and our families.
May her cry become our call to action. May her song be the anthem of every person who chooses love over hate, truth over denial, memory over silence.
For we must ask ourselves, as a nation and as humanity:
“Ese Mbaze nde?” Who can I ask?
The answer, painful as it is, may very well be: You.
You are left to tell the story. You are the one they must ask. You are the keeper of memory.
Let the story never die. Let the silence never return. Let the music of truth ring louder than the drums of hate.
Suzanne Nyiranyamibwa sang, and in doing so, she gave us the courage to answer:
“Ngire nte?”
Here is how: We remember. We protect the truth. We raise a generation that kneels before the sacred story of survival and stands up to say:
Never again is not negotiable. Never again is now.
Suzanne Nyiranyamibwa is one of those rare voices still preserved to remind Rwanda and the world what it means to survive the unspeakable.
