When time does not seem to move forward, but circles endlessly around an open wound. In Rwanda, during the commemoration period of the Genocide Against the Tutsi, the entire nation walks through such a time.
The atmosphere becomes thick with remembrance, sorrow, and reflection. It is a time that demands a deep pauseâ”not for ceremony aloneâ”but for confronting the unbearable truths that still linger like unsettled spirits.
I still remember one Kwibuka event before 2010â” I was invited to give a speech about the genocide against Tutsi at the currently Pele Stadium at Nyamirambo. Minutes before getting forward to speak, was the song of by one artist known at Kwibuka events.
Among the many voices that pierce this profound silence at Kwibuka, few are as haunting, as tender, as accusatory, and as true as the voice of Mariya Yohana Mukankuranga in her song “NKWIBUTSE SE KWIBUKA?” â” “SHOULD I REMIND YOU TO REMEMBER?” The words in the song, and its refrain 'â¦SINDATA IGITI' left me sobbing.
Again, last year, April 2024â” a friend, Assumpta Mugiraneza, at a certain Kwibuka event reminded me about this song. Ever since, I decided I should pen reflections on Mariya Yohana’s cry to humanity.
The song is not merely music. It is a lament. It is a dirge. It is an indictment of forgetting. It is an unbearable cry from the depth of a soul too wounded to forget, a soul that still stands at the threshold of mass graves, a soul that has not â” and perhaps will never â” “swept away the ashes.”
It is fundamental to recognize: although Mariya Yohana sings to Rwanda, her words fly far beyond her nation’s borders.
They are a summons to humanity. They are a mirror held up to every society that dares to excuse, deny, or diminish the profound evil of genocide.
They are a critical reproach to those who, in cowardice, criminal minded or in malice, seek to silence the memories of the slaughtered by denying their deaths, justifying their suffering, or moving on without justice.
There are wounds that never heal. It is a critical fact in the lives of the genocide survivors.
“Rwandan, should I remind you to remember?” she asks â” not out of condescension, but out of heartbreak.
The question itself is almost rhetorical, as she immediately answers it: “You are constantly reminded, the slightest tremor plunges you back into memory, of one or the other.”
Trauma is not something you schedule. It does not keep to anniversaries or ceremonies. It creeps up in unexpected moments: the sound of a scream, the look in someone’s eye, the sudden smell of blood and rainwater-soaked earth, the tremor of a distant footstep.
For survivors of the Genocide Against the Tutsi, memory is not voluntary. It is not something you can lock in a box and revisit when convenient. It bleeds through the walls of everyday life. It floods dreams. It rises unbidden in moments of apparent peace.
Mariya Yohana captures this precisely. She does not need to remind Rwandans to remember because forgetting is impossible. And yet, the fact that she still feels compelled to sing this song â” to plead, to cry out â” shows that forgetting has many faces. The forgetting she rebukes is not that of personal memory, but the collective, societal forgetting that denialists seek to impose.
Exhaustion Beyond Words
“O God, I hide no secret from You, I am exhausted!
How tired I am!
My heart returns to it so often,
Strength fails me, grant me respite.”
Here, the song moves from the communal to the deeply personal. In these lines, we feel the spiritual exhaustion of carrying memory. To remember â” truly to remember â” is not passive. It is a burden. It is labor.
There is a cost to remembering in a world that so often asks victims to be silent.
There is a cost to standing, year after year, against a tide of cynicism, denial, minimization, and false equivalencies.
There is a cost to mourning a family wiped from existence â” a family whose names and faces and laughter live on only in the heart of a survivor.
Mariya Yohana does not hide that cost. She confesses it openly before God: she is exhausted. She is heartbroken. She has no strength left to fight the memories that come â” and yet, she fights to keep remembering because to forget would be to betray the dead.
She says, “I still mourn them; I have not yet swept away the ashes.”
In Rwandan culture, “sweeping away the ashes” marks the end of mourning. But how can mourning end when the dead are so many, when their final resting places were so often mass graves, open fields, rivers, septic tanks? How can mourning end when justice remains incomplete, when denial of their suffering is voiced across continents by those with poisoned tongues?
To say “I have not yet swept away the ashes” is to proclaim an unfinished grief. It is to say: “I am not yet done remembering, and I will not be rushed by those who are uncomfortable with my sorrow.”
The song gives us the insupportable specificity of memory.
Mariya Yohana does not remain abstract. She brings before us the unbearable images that denialism tries to erase:
“I remember those dying infants and feel faint,
Their mothers were dishonored by their executioners before the final blow…”
“I also remember those who were thrown into mass graves,
Those whose lifeless bodies decayed in the open air,
And those whose fate remains unknown.”
Mariya Yohana is one of the artists known for creating touching commemoration songs.
This is memory in its most brutal honesty. It is memory that refuses the sanitized version of history that cowards and criminals prefer. It forces the listener â” forces humanity â” to look at what happened. To see the infants murdered, the women raped and butchered, the dead dumped like refuse, the missing forever lost.
These memories are not decorative. They are not political tools. They are sacred testaments to lives destroyed by hatred and indifference.
To sing these horrendous memories aloud is to resist the tide of historical revisionism. It is to bear witness, so that humanity itself is held accountable.
Believe it or not survivors speak with crippled voices, but they speak. They have to. And Maria Yohana has to.
“My hiding place was not discovered, but I cannot say I am unharmed,
Indeed, I am but a crippled survivor…”
Here, Mariya Yohana speaks for many survivors. Physical survival does not mean whole survival. Many lived, but not without losing parts of themselves: trust, family, hope, bodily integrity, psychological wholeness.
To survive genocide is to live with an irreparable rupture in one’s being.
Yet despite being “crippled,” survivors continue to speak. And their voices, though frail or trembling, carry moral authority that no denier can erase. Their existence shames the silence of the world that abandoned them. Their testimonies are wounds that bleed truth into the sterile lies of history’s manipulators.
We are also reminded of a wound Shared by the earth itself.
“Say, Rwandan (of all backgrounds), remember:
Though time passes, though it perishes,
The memory of all those rivers reddened by the blood of the innocent endures.”
The land itself carries memory. Rivers ran red. Trees witnessed slaughter. Hills were stained with the last cries of the innocent.
Memory is not only personal. It is geographical. It is inscribed into Rwanda’s soil, into the wind, into the rain.
When Mariya Yohana calls on all Rwandans â” of all backgrounds â” she is recognizing that memory is a duty that transcends ethnicity. Those who deny, those who equivocate, those who forget â” they betray not only the victims but the very land they walk upon.
The Sacred Geography of Mourning
Mariya Yohana names places:
Ntarama in Bugesera.
Gisozi.
Bisesero.
These are not random names. They are sacred sites like many others. They are open wounds on the map.
Ntarama, where the faithful sought sanctuary and found slaughter.
Gisozi, where over 200,000 rest, but not in peace, for their memories demand justice.
Bisesero, where resistance was met with betrayal and death.
She invokes these places to remind us that remembrance is not theoretical. It has names, it has coordinates, it has witnesses. It has spirits that linger, asking not merely to be remembered but to be honored through truth and justice.
Finally, Mariya Yohana warns Against False Reconciliation:
“One cannot reconcile on guilt and resentment, never.
One cannot build unity with irreparable wounds at the center.
But truthful justice is restorative.”
This is perhaps the most important lesson for the world. There is no shortcut to peace. No reconciliation without truth. No unity while denial, guilt, and resentment fester unaddressed.
Those who urge survivors to “move on,” who accuse them of “clinging to the past,” who say “both sides committed atrocities,” are enemies of justice. They seek cheap peace at the price of truth. They seek false reconciliation built atop the bones of the innocent.
Mariya Yohana rejects that path. True healing â” if it is ever to be â” can only come through the labor of truth-telling, justice, repentance, and authentic remembrance.
Memory is not a weight we carry to paralyze us; it is a duty we embrace to remain human. To forget, to grow indifferent, or to distort the past is not healingâ”it is betrayal.
The wounds left by cruelty and injustice do not close when ignored; they fester in silence. True reconciliation does not arise from erasing pain or brushing aside uncomfortable truths.
It demands courage: the courage to name what happened, to listen to the silence left by the victims, and to honor their dignity by refusing to let their suffering be buried under the sands of forgetfulness. Remembering is not a passive act; it is an active guardianship, a defiance against cynicism, denial, and the slow erosion of conscience. It is a recognition that the rivers of blood that once flowed cannot be dismissed for the sake of fragile comfort.
Those who were lostâ”the children, the mothers, the brothers and sistersâ”call upon us not with words but with their absence, an absence that demands moral clarity.
Memory reminds us that hatred, once unleashed, spares no one, and that the protection of life requires vigilance, honesty, and unwavering commitment.
To remember is to affirm a bond of shared humanity, to bear witness across time and distance. It is to reject the cruel temptation of indifference.
It is to rise above fear and weariness and recognize that dignity and justice are not gifts, but responsibilities. The future we long for will not be built by those who avert their eyes, but by those who hold memory close, who dare to feel the sorrow, and who transform it into a fierce commitment to protect life.
In the end, memory is not just about the past. It is a shield for the future, a moral foundation laid stone by stone through remembrance, honesty, and care. To remember is to choose conscience over convenience, courage over silence, and life over death.
A Cry for Humanity
“I still mourn them; I have not yet swept away the ashes.”
This refrain is not just Rwanda’s truth. It is humanity’s truth.
Everywhere genocides have happened â” in Namibia, in Armenia, in the Shoah, in Rwanda, in Cambodia, in Bosnia, in the DR Congo, â” the victims cry out with one voice: “Remember us. Tell the truth. Mourn us rightly.”
Mariya Yohana’s song is more than a personal lament or a national anthem of grief. It is a universal indictment.
To forget is to kill them again.
To deny is to side with the murderers.
To minimize is to soil the sacred.
To remember is the beginning of justice.
In a world that is dangerously quick to forget, dangerously willing to distort history, dangerously willing to betray the dead in the name of political expediency, “Nkwibutse se Kwibuka?” stands as a solemn, fierce reminder:
There are ashes that must never be swept away.
There are memories that must never die.
There is mourning that must never be rushed.
There is truth that must never be silenced.
In remembering, we remain human.
In denying, we become monsters.
And so, even as exhaustion threatens to break us, even as sorrow weighs down the heart, we answer Mariya Yohana’s cry:
We remember. We mourn.
WE HAVE NOT YET SWEPT AWAY THE ASHESâ” AND WE SHALL NOT SWEEP AWAY THE ASHES.
NTITURATA IGITI kandi NTITUZATA IGITI.
Mariya Yohana warned against false reconciliation in one of her songs.
