Despite everything, we continued running our business together. One day, someone informed Anne Marie that some people were planning to trick her. They were going to ask her to take a crate of beer to the killers. The killers would then kill her because she was a Tutsi. She came and told me about it. I told her not to be afraid.

Eventually we were chased out of Rubirizi and we went at Mubone. There we met the Mayor of Bujumbura town and Mr Iddy Nziragucumura and we were able to return back to Kinama. Together with Mr Nziragucumura and Member of Parliament Laurent we began working to reunite the people who lived in Kinama and Cibitoke. In Cibitoke were the Tutsi who fled the Hutu neighbourhoods. In Kinama now there were only Hutu. We begun counting the households abandoned by the Hutu in Cibitoke and the ones abandoned by the Tutsi in Kinama.

When the Tutsi in Chibitoke saw Anne Marie, they were astonished. "How come you are still alive?" they asked her. "Where are you living?" She told them that she was living in Kinama. That is why they gave her the nickname "Fake Tutsi" because they could not understand how a Tutsi managed to stay alive in Kinama together with the Hutu until that point.

Why did you risk your life to save Anne Marie?
To be good to others depends on the feelings one has for others. Whether you consider them to be human beings or not. A good person does not feel happy when someone else is suffering. That is why I behaved like I did. This woman was a mother. We were working together. She was not amongst these who killed Ndadaye. She was not a politician. She did not deserve to be killed. That is what made me save her. There was nothing to be gained by seeing a person like that killed.

After you saved Anne Marie, how did other Hutu treat you?
Initially, they hated me. In Kinama every Hutu who was in good terms with the Tutsi was called a traitor. One would even be killed because of that. Some people were looking to kill me but I managed to evade them until the crisis was over. God helped and the situation is quiet now.

Neighbours kept telling lies about me. They were saying I was a traitor who was taking Hutu secrets to the Tutsi. One of Anne Marie's brothers was a soldier working in Muramvya. He used to come to visit us, go out with us, buy us drinks and brochettes. Thus people concluded that I was his prostitute and a traitor. They said one had to be careful of me. They decided not to talk to me any more because I would tell all the secrets to the Tutsi. I seemed to have been abandoned by people of my ethnic group.

Whenever they told me I was a traitor, I answered that if saving other human beings made you a traitor, I was happy to be one.

Interview by Maziar Bahari
Translated by Tatien Nkeshimana
Edited by David Shem-Tov