When the marauding militiamen arrived at her door on that morning in April 1994, Florence Mukantaganda knew there was nowhere to run.
It was only three days into the devastating 100-day genocide in Rwanda, when militiamen rampaged through the streets and people’s homes in a bloodshed that forever upended life in the Central African nation. As the men entered her home, Ms. Mukantaganda said her husband, a preacher, prayed for her and their two small children and furtively told her where he had hidden some money in case she survived.
He then said his final words to her before he was hacked to death with a hoe.
“He told me, ‘When they come for you, you have to be strong, you have to die strong,’” Ms. Mukantaganda, 53, recalled on a recent morning at her home in Kabuga, a small town about 10 miles east of Kigali, the Rwandan capital. “There was nothing we could do but wait for our time to die.”
The agony of those harrowing days loomed large for many on Sunday as Rwanda marked the 30th anniversary of the genocide in which extremists from the country’s ethnic Hutu majority killed some 800,000 people — most of them ethnic Tutsis — using machetes, clubs and guns.
“Our journey has been long and tough,” President Paul Kagame said on Sunday at a ceremony at an indoor arena. “Rwanda was completely humbled by the magnitude of our loss, and the lessons we learned are engraved in blood.”
Representatives from regional and global institutions like the African Union, the European Union and the United Nations were present at the ceremony, as well as ministerial delegations and current and former leaders from some 60 nations.