You know, you hear one or two people saying something
and call you a snake, inzoka.
So because I was tall and skinny
and that kind of labeling
you know, made me, you know,
feel unsafe around, you know, around other kids.
And that's what I was asking my family,
even though my dad never, ever was,
he wasn't a person who always tell me that this is a Hutu,
this is a Tutsi -- he always tell me that everybody is all the same.
You know, they're all Christians. He was a Christian man.
So but I start sensing that
when I was, you know, I
was ten, 12.
I mean, but from ten years old, that’s when I knew exactly what it was.
And in school, of course, in primary school,
they'll ask me every single morning.
That we will go to class,
we'll
sing the national anthem, we will pray,
and they'll call their names to see who came to school.
And they'll said, Hutu and Tutsi.
They'll call your name and later on they’ll
ask who was the Hutu, who’s a Tutsi.
So you have to raise your hands.
So the first time
my friend, who was mixed,
raised as a Hutu -- and I raised with him.
He said no, the teacher, because the teacher knew my family
he was like, “No, you are Tutsi.” And I find myself, we are two of us
in a classroom of 45 people and that kind of
action,
you know, made me feel like I'm different.
And the people look at me.
Other kids will look at me like I'm different because Tutsis,
you know, they used to call us inyenzi, inzoka,
which is “cockroach” and “snake.” And that's not something you call people.
Once you start labeling people, you know, pretty much it's degrading them.
So and it was it was somehow uncomfortable.