Human Rights Award to Daughters of Africa

Africa’s Daughters Are Gems


“Place Africa in the hands of the African womenand the continent would leave the rest of the world way behind.” APKY in DARKEST EUROPE AND AFRICA’S NIGHTMARE: A CRITICAL OBSERVATION OF NEIGHBORING CONTINENTS

Eugénie Musayidire receiving the Nuremberg International Human Rights Award 2007 from the Lord Mayor of Nuremberg Dr Ulrich Maly at the Nuremberg Opera House

The whole world knows about them – the mighty daughters of Africa such as Wangari Maathai, the environmentalist and political activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. Two other daughters of Africa have won the Nuremberg International Human Rights Award which is a biennial event that was started by the city of Nuremberg in 1995, attended by an international audience and by invitation only. On each occasion when my sisters were awardees, I clapped my hands in the Opera House until my palms were ready to produce sparks, shouting Bravo! Bravo! for the duration of the standing ovations, the veins snaking down my neck, as I’ve been informed. Since the founding of the award, there have been nine awardees, five men (two of them jointly for their engagement in fostering a better understanding between Israelis and Arabs) and four women. Two of the women are daughters of Africa – Fatimata M’Baye from Mauritania in 1999 and the 2007 award went to Rwandan Eugénie Musayidire.

Inspired by the message contained in the "Way of Human Rights", the city of Nuremberg established the "Nuremberg International Human Rights Award" endowed with Euro 15,000 (19,000 dollars). The first award was presented on September 17, 1995 to the Russian human rights activist Sergej Kovalev, almost exactly 60 years after the passing of the National Socialist – Nazi – racial laws and 50 years after the end of World War II. It is a response to the human rights violations of those years and intended "to symbolise that any messages emanating from Nuremberg in the present and in the future will be symbols of peace reconciliation and human understanding". This award, to quote from its statutes, “is intended to contribute towards the observance and implementation of Human Rights as a universal and indivisible principle ... It honours individuals or groups who have, in an exemplary manner, committed themselves to the respect of Human Rights, sometimes at considerable personal risk. "The Nuremberg International Human Rights Awards is also to be seen as a call for individual commitment and is hoped to contribute to a spirit of responsibility towards human rights. The decision on the award is made by an international jury.

Eugénie tells her own story thus:

“I grew up in the village of Nyanza [in Rwanda] and have happy memories of my childhood there. My father was a doctor and was killed in 1959, but my mother didn't marry again, and I grew up with my mother and brother. In 1973 when I was in my 20s, I found my name on a list of Tutsis who were going to be arrested. I escaped overnight to Burundi. Four years later I sought asylum in Germany, where I raised a small family. My mother used to come and visit me every year for three or four months. Her last visit was from May-September 1993. I should have kept her with me. My mother thought that nothing would happen to her in Rwanda - she was an old lady, the oldest in the village, the lively and cheerful granny of orphan children. Who would dare to harm her? She was mistaken.

“My mother died on 22 April 1994, in Nyanza where all the Tutsi were killed on that day. In all, 29 members of my family were killed then: my mother, my brother, his four children and his wife, my aunts, uncles, cousins, godchildren and friends. The only members of my family who survived were already living in Europe before 1994. Now I have nobody living in Rwanda. My trauma and pain in experiencing the genocide from Germany were indescribable. I would watch the television news, searching for the faces of my mother, brother and friends, hoping against hope to recognise my loved ones amidst the mass of refugees. But they were nowhere to be seen. My anguish was doubled by the fact that I knew my mother's murderer. He was one of our Hutu neighbours, long known to the family. He and I had played together as children. My mother taught his wife to sew, prepared his daughter for her wedding, looked after the two little ones when they were young. She used to take his family presents from Germany: soap, lotion, chocolate, biscuits, exercise books and pencils for the children. How was it that he gathered up those innocent people and marched them for an hour to prepared mass graves?

“I went back to Rwanda in January 2001 to meet my mother's murderer. His sister didn't understand what her brother had done. His mother felt the same. She took me in her arms and we cried and cried together. It's difficult to explain my feelings about meeting the person who killed my mother. I can't pardon him. I don't want vengeance, but I need time and distance from him. I could possibly forgive him but he has refused to admit his responsibility for the genocide and for my mother's death. He doesn't show remorse. Forgiveness is a two-way process. I am the victim and I feel sadness and mourn, but the killer must show remorse and sadness for what he or she has done.”

The 1999 awardee, Lawyer Fatimata M’Baye from Mauritania

The 54-year-old Eugénie returned to Rwanda in 2001 of her own free will and founded the association Izere (Hope), which looks after orphaned young people, some of whom are still today suffering awfully from the horrible experiences of the 1994 genocide. Izere is an encounter and therapy centre. The young people receive expert help. Some of them live there permanently because they lost all their family members during the genocide. Eugénie is also tackling the task of reconciliation which is still far from being accomplished. At first she was herself shattered and in need of therapy and received psychotherapeutic assistance for a long time before she could gradually stand on firm grounds again. During the therapy she started writing to get all her grief, rage and despair off her chest. The result of this arduous process was her book “Mein Stein spricht” (My Stone Talks) published in 1999. But for this determined daughter of Africa, writing was not the end. So after returning to Rwanda in 2001 she visited the man who killed her mother with two strokes of the axe on the mother’s head, in a Nyanza prison where he is serving a life sentence. A TV documentary “My Mother’s Murderer” was produced which covered the terrible journey Eugénie made. The documentary won the Grimme Media Prize in 2003. The murderer talked with Eugénie and admitted killing people including the mother of Eugénie, but refused to apologise, claiming that he had been forced to act like he did, that he had bowed to outside pressure, followed others. With these excuses the man tried to justify himself to Eugénie.
Dealing with the causes and, most of all, the repercussions of genocide is now one of the tasks Eugénie is tackling in Izere, the place of security and comfort for the traumatised young people, both Hutu and Tutsi. She focuses on caring for young people who are traumatised, some of them severely, because of the 1994 genocide. She is now making plans to build a small school with her prize money, where her protégés can catch up on their qualifications, for example in the tailor’s workshop in Izere. And of course the psychotherapeutic assistance.

Fatimata M’Baye was born in 1957 in Mauritania. She is a lawyer and has been fighting with admirable courage and at high personal risks for the rights of her Afroancestral ethnic group in Mauritania. This group is still being discriminated against by the country’s Moorish majority and elite. Fatimata is fighting for the rights of women and children and against slavery which is still in existence in the country. She has been imprisoned time and again but always picks up her struggles the minute she steps out of the prison gates. She has become a symbolic figure fighting for respect for human rights in Africa. In awarding her the prize in 1999, the Nuremberg jury acknowledged her exemplary and courageous commitment to human rights. Fatimata initiated projects in Mauritania which are intended to support the Afroancestral population, among them the foundation of an association fighting for legal reappraisal of human rights violations and offering new perspectives for the future of the victims’ families.

Power to, and God bless, the Daughters of Africa!