Be a Light in the Darkness

On the morning of Friday, October 22, 1993, Maggy Barankitse woke up in her village on Nyamutobo Hill in Burundi and walked with her seven adopted children into the nearby town of Ruyigi. Maggy was headed to her job at the church where she worked for the diocesan office, and the children were on their way to school, except Chloe, who was home from her university on holiday. When they arrived in town, they found that school had been canceled, and then Maggy heard the news: a day earlier, a faction in the Tutsi-led military had assassinated the Hutu president Melchior Ndadaye. The first democratically elected president of the country, he was just three months into a five-year term. With warnings that vengeful Hutu were wreaking havoc on Tutsi villages in other parts of the country, Maggy went to the bishop’s residence to retrieve valuable documents related to her adopted children, who were both Hutu and Tutsi. Then she headed back to her village, telling Chloe to gather food and take the children to the bishop’s residence.

When Maggy got to the ravine that marks the low point before the gentle rise of Nyamutobo Hill she could see that her house and other houses in her village were in flames. Soon she met members of her family fleeing the scene, and they were adamant that it was too dangerous for her to continue. While Maggy was stranded on the road, unsure of what to do, the children came to find her. She asked family members if she could join them. They replied, “Not unless you leave your Hutu children behind.” Hutu, after all, were at that moment destroying their village. Maggy refused. Moving on, she encountered some Hutu who were headed for the nearby Tanzanian border. She asked if she could join them. “Only if you leave your Tutsi children here.”

Maggy’s village had become an inferno, and no one wanted anything to do with Maggy and her Hutu and Tutsi children. She decided to go to the bishop’s compound. Along the way, she met her good friend Juliette Bigirimana, a Tutsi married to a Hutu. Juliette was a nurse; her husband, Cyprian Ndimurwanko, was a physician. They had two young children. “Come with me,” Maggy told Juliette. “I am a Tutsi with both Tutsi and Hutu children. You are a Tutsi married to a Hutu. We must be prophets. Now is the time for us to show people that Tutsi and Hutu don’t need to kill each other.”

By evening Maggy, Juliette, Cyprian, and all the children were in the bishop’s compound, along with a growing number of others, mostly Hutu. What followed were thirty-six hours of anxious limbo. During this time, she and some of the priests made forays into town. “We tried to help the best we could, still hoping the catastrophe was limited to what had already transpired on the hillsides.”

Ruyigi sits in the eastern reaches of Burundi, sixty miles east of Bujumbura and the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Tanzania is less than twenty miles to the southeast, and the Rwandan border is seventy-five miles to the north. Most people have heard of the Rwandan genocide, even if the details have faded over the decades. But what transpired in Burundi is largely unknown, perhaps because, viewed from the outside, it was less dramatic: not a hundred-day rampage that left as many as a million people dead and millions more displaced, but a drawn-out war that produced hundreds of thousands of dead and a greater number of orphans – all in a country roughly the size of Maryland with a population of six million.

Of course, for people who lived in Burundi between 1993 and 2008, the Burundian violence was very similar that of Rwanda, with the added burden that it went on for years. Still, as Maggy points out, the conflict started long before then.

“People think it started in 1993, but it started in 1972, when I was sixteen. I was away in secondary school in Bujumbura when Tutsi began to kill Hutu. They killed some of our teachers, and some of my classmates lost their fathers, but the school didn’t tell us to pray, even when we were in church. They had no compassion. I remember I couldn’t sleep, and I cried all night. I decided to leave school and return home.” At home, Maggy confronted her mother, Therese: “Tell me why they killed our teachers. You say we are all children of God. How, then, in a Catholic school are they not able to protect the teachers?” Growing up, Maggy explains, she heard little of Hutu or Tutsi. “My mother took me to church every morning before school. She taught me humility and compassion and that we are all one family, so I didn’t understand why people were killing one another.” The ethnic violence of 1972 so stunned Maggy that she refused to return to school, saying to her mother simply, “You lied to me.”

Maggy Barankitse with three orphan children at Shalom House Ruyigi, Burundi. Photograph by Ruby / Alamy Stock Photo.

A report the following year summarized the harsh realities. “Through the spring and summer of 1972, in the obscure central African state of Burundi, there took place the systematic killing of as many as a quarter million people. Though exact numbers can never be known, most eyewitnesses agree that over a four-month period, men, women, and children were savagely murdered at the rate of more than a thousand a day.” The immediate cause of this genocide was an April 29 Hutu-led uprising. The insurgents numbered about a thousand. Over a few days, they killed roughly the same number of Tutsi – and Hutu, too, when the latter refused to join in the killing.

Faced with Maggy’s accusation that she had lied, her mother responded the way any parent of a teenager would: “And where will you go? If you want to change this society, you must study.” Then her mother said something else: “If you’ve suffered so much, be a light in the darkness.”

“You see,” Maggy explains, “we were in the village, with no electricity. But in Africa, we have these small bottles, and we put in oil and a wick and light them with a match. In Burundi we call them colloboi. Sometimes, when my mom wanted to read the Bible, or to pray, she would use these for light. She brought me one and said, ‘When you are abandoned, you can be this. But you must not be too bright. You don’t want to become a rebel. Just a small light wherever you are.’” When darkness enveloped Ruyigi in October 1993, Maggy’s mother was not there to support her, having died of cancer in 1989.

By Sunday, October 24, well over a hundred people – a mix Hutu and Tutsi – had found refuge in the bishop’s compound. The bishop was out of town; in his absence, the vicar general was responsible. About 9:00 a.m., Maggy and others were preparing breakfast and planning for Mass. Rather than risk the quarter-mile walk to the cathedral amid the continued chaos in town, they had decided to hold the service in the garden outside the bishop’s residence.

Maggy was the first to see what appeared to be a mob of Tutsi climbing the fence into the bishop’s compound. She told everyone to run or to hide, suspecting that it was more than a mob.

The Burundian military had long been led by Tutsi, and the day before, Maggy had watched a military plane land in Ruyigi. “Normally the military protects everyone, but the arrival of the military in Ruyigi meant that revenge was going to be hard.” That was the lesson of the 1972 genocide, when the Tutsi-dominated military organized killing squads with specific instructions to target Hutu, especially Hutu intellectuals.

“That’s why I told the father of Lydia and Lysette to go hide in the ceiling.” Cyprian did not need convincing. His father had been a victim of the pogrom against the Hutu in 1972. The vicar general – a Tutsi like Maggy – crawled under a bed. Maggy tried to hide, too, in a way that later became laughable: she and eight other women tried to fit under a different single bed. When Maggy heard familiar voices, she got up and looked through the curtains. Outside, she saw her cousin’s husband and students she knew from the college in Rusengo. Grabbing Juliette, she went out to meet them, thinking that she could intervene to stop the impending violence. As she left, she locked the door to the great hall, where many people were hiding.

Outside, she confronted the men leading the mob. They demanded that she open the door. When she refused, one of them slapped her; others forced the door open. Maggy tried to negotiate, but they were undeterred. “You and your ideas. We’ll burn everything; we’ll show you.” They proceeded to splash gasoline throughout the great hall and then set the building on fire. Maggy continued to plead and protest, but to these Tutsi men, some of whom were her relatives, the fact that she was seeking to protect Hutu made her a traitor.

Yelling at her insolence, her cousin’s husband threatened to kill her. She dared him: “I’ll haunt you to the end of your days.” He leveled his rifle at her chest but didn’t pull the trigger. Instead, he ripped off her clothes, bound her to a nearby chair, and started to beat her. All the while, Maggy kept up her dare. “Beat me, kill me, and I’ll come for you in the night.” By this time, the building was on fire and people were fleeing through the single exit to escape the flames and smoke. “Some people came out on fire.” Then the killers separated Hutu from Tutsi, and the Tutsi ran away. “They abandoned me,” Maggy says.

Maggy Barankitse. Photograph by Ruby / Alamy Stock Photo.

Some of the Hutu were also able to escape unnoticed. “It was chaos. Not everyone was there to kill. Some were just robbers. Some were survivors of Hutu machetes from two days before, who were looking for food and alcohol because they were in despair.” Maggy, bound to a chair, watched helplessly as those who had come to kill got on with their business. Some of them had guns, but mostly they had clubs, stones, bamboo spears, and machetes.

Because Juliette was a Tutsi, the killers offered to spare her life, but not her husband’s. She responded, “I married not a Hutu but the man I love. If you are going to kill my husband, you should kill me too.” Then to Maggy, “Please raise Lydia and Lysette like your own children, love them, give them kindness.” The two children were there, with their mother and father. Juliette moved to pass them to Maggy, but her arms were bound to the chair.

“Untie her,” Juliette demanded. The killers hesitated until Maggy offered them an incentive: “Untie me, and I’ll take you to the coffer where the bishop keeps the money.” One of the men untied Maggy, and Juliette set Lydia on Maggy’s lap. Then to her executioners Juliette said, “Kill me.” As one of the them swung his machete, Maggy did her best to divert the attention of Lydia and Lysette. As children of a Hutu father, the girls were not immune from being the next casualties. Maggy had just seen some men kill children, and Lydia and Lysette were not the only newly-orphaned children in the compound. No longer bound, Maggy upped the ante of the bargain that had freed her from the chair. She would lead the killers to the money in the bishop’s office in exchange for the lives of Lydia, Lysette, and the other children. The men followed her to the office. But that wasn’t the end of it.

“I began also to fight in order to take this child or that child away from a killer, saying, ‘Take this,’ and giving wine or whiskey, or the key to the store room, or some little bit of money, and then in the chaos I hid the children.”

Maggy says she was tied to the chair for about an hour, until 10:00 a.m. or so, and that her fight to save children lasted until 1:00 or 2:00 p.m. At one point, she entered the burning building, “until I could no longer stand the heat.”  

Sometime around 3:00 p.m., the killers departed, and Maggy began looking for the children she had sent into hiding, as well as for her own, whom she had not seen since she left the building. When she and Juliette had stepped outside, Chloe was still in her pajamas preparing breakfast. When Maggy couldn’t find Chloe or any of her own children among all the bodies strewn around the garden, she panicked.

Distraught, she went into the nearby chapel and unloaded her emotions on God: “My mother lied to me. She told me you were love, but where is love in what I have just witnessed? Where is love in being spared death, in being the one who had to watch everyone else being killed? Where is love in the loss of my own children?”

As she continued railing against God in this way, she heard Chloe’s voice from the sacristy. “Mama, we are here. We’re alive.” Somehow when everyone had scattered in the morning, Chloe had taken her six younger siblings and made it into the chapel, where she’d found a hiding place among the priests’ vestments.

Later Chloe described what it was like to be huddled in the sacristy while all the killing was going on outside in the garden. “I heard gun shots. I heard people being killed. I heard wounded people screaming. I also heard Maggy fighting. It wasn’t until about 1:00 p.m. that the gunfire stopped. By then, I could no longer hear Maggy, and I thought she was dead.”

“When I found my children,” Maggy says, “immediately I understood how sublime my vocation was.” At sixteen, she had set a course to become a teacher because of what she had experienced during a genocide. As a young teacher of twenty-three, she had adopted a Hutu child who had lost her father to that same event. At twenty-four, she was fired for using her classroom to challenge the Tutsi-led government’s discrimination against Hutu. She had then approached Archbishop Ruhuna with her vision for a new generation in Burundi. Now Maggy was the survivor of an ethnically charged massacre of Hutu at the hands of Tutsi, which was revenge for a massacre of Tutsi at the hands of Hutu. And God had spared not only Maggy but her seven Hutu and Tutsi children. “Oh, God, how strange that I discovered my vocation among atrocities.”

Maggy Barankitse has received international acclaim for her work with her country’s orphans through her organization Maison Shalom. Her experiences are recounted in a new book, Love Made Me an Inventor: The Story of Maggy Barankitse - Humanitarian, Genocide Survivor, Citizen Without Borders, by David Toole (Orbis Books, 2025), from which this article has been excerpted with permission.