It was a shared sense of displacement that brought Jabo Butera and Lilian Uwimana together. As Rwandan refugees at school in Congo they bonded over feeling different and soon became high school sweethearts. But the impending devastation of their home nation shaped a love story that spans generations and continents, proving that forgiveness and true love can overcome trauma. 

‘We fell in love with each other’s character and talked for hours everyday,’ says Liliane, reflecting on the teenage romance with Jabo. But when the school term ended, Jabo never returned. 

Compelled by the growing tension in his native country, Jabo left to join the Rwanda Patriotic Force — without saying goodbye to Liliane. He spent the early 1990s immersed in the chaos and violence that took over Rwanda, climaxing in 100 days of slaughter where over 800,000 people were killed from April to July 1994. As a driver, he was spared the horror of firing guns and wielding machetes but was still surrounded by bloodshed. 

Meanwhile, Liliane banished thoughts of her absent boyfriend as she followed the developments from Congo, watching the news with increasing dread for her relatives in Rwanda. When the war ended in July 1994 she and her family left everything behind and returned to help rebuild their native country. 

What they found was sobering. Jabo describes how ‘the streets were full of bodies’. Soldiers had to kill the dogs so they didn’t eat the corpses. ‘You just keep going, trying to suppress the emotions, trying to behave differently, burying the bodies, finding the mines’.

But amidst the desolation there was a sliver of hope: Jabo and Liliane managed to find each other by chance in the capital city of Kigali. Liliane describes how the relationship had shifted with all that happened in their time apart: 

‘When I found him, he had experienced all this atrocity. It was a strange person that I met this time. He had gone through all these changes and such huge trauma. He wasn’t as communicative’. And yet, she says, ‘our love and desire to be together was still there’. 

Liliane was busy finding her feet in a new country, while Jabo was working to make the streets safe and rebuild the community. He would sneak away between RPF duties to visit her, rekindling the initial spark they’d both felt. But just as the couple reconnected, they were once again forced apart. 

In a bid to get him out of the RPF and back into education, Jabo’s family tricked him into going on a short trip – which ended up being three years back in Congo finishing school. An oblivious Jabo didn’t even think to say goodbye to his girlfriend. 

So once again Liliane was abandoned with no explanation and no idea when Jabo would return. ‘I was convinced he was going to turn up,’ she recalls. But over time her faith dwindled and she started dating someone else — just as Jabo finally returned to Rwanda. 

Jabo was really distraught,’ Liliane explains. ‘And I was heartbroken, but I can’t say yes to someone and then no again when Jabo just showed up and I didn’t know when he would come again because he kept disappearing.’

It was a bitter, brief reunion for them both. Jabo left to study Law at the University of Rwanda. Liliane got married, had children and began studying psychology. 

This time apart helped them both come to terms with the traumatic legacy of Rwandan genocide. Jabo’s studies were fuelled by a desire to ‘find a way to solve arguments without throwing punches’ and to restore justice. But in the aftermath of genocide, Rwandan prisons were so full of war criminals that the traditional justice system could not cope. So Jabo and his fellow law students were tasked with setting up a solution: the innovative Gacaca court system where trials took place within the community quickly, fairly and with no additional resources.

Jabo’s job was to equip people to hold fair hearings in their own villages, without the formal guidance of judges or courtrooms. ‘You learn what it is to be impartial,’ he explains. ‘We were not teaching law or articles, but we were passing the knowledge of how to transcend selfishness and share a broader, more nationalistic view’. 

This crash course in forgiveness had a profound personal impact on Jabo.  ‘It’s so powerful,’ he reflects. ‘It might not be your case, it might not be related to you, yet when you come and hear what has happened… and the family looking to know what happened to their relatives, you can see the weight lifting off their shoulders’. 

Meanwhile, Liliane was also in search of catharsis. A need to understand why and how people could commit such atrocities motivated her to study psychology. The intensity of the course led her to seek personal counselling to work through the impact of national suffering on her own psyche. 

By their third chance reunion, Liliane and Jabo had each been through their own healing and soul-searching. Having both moved to England, they met this time as successful adults, with their own histories.

But that first spark was as strong as ever and the couple had learned how to forgive the grievances of the past and focus on their future together: ‘The beauty of it is that we found we love the same things,’ Liliane explains. ‘We have the same passions. We speak the same emotional language. We pick each other up and we know where one has a need for that support’. 

‘What has made this perfect is that we have gone into our own lives and done all these mistakes and been in these relationships that never worked… then it was the universe bringing us back.’  

The post ‘It Was The Universe Bringing Us Back’ : A Very Rwandan Romance  appeared first on Home of the Other.