ON OCTOBER 1 1990, Appolline Kaburame woke up to a day that turned out to be the last time she would see her husband alive. 

On that day her husband Joseph Kaburame, walked out of the house to begin a journey of no return.  He joined the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) which had launched a struggle to liberate Rwanda. Her husband’s goodbye that day turned a new chapter in her life and their seven children.

Even with her fears of the breadwinner leaving his family, Kaburame understood and supported her husband’s decision, but she looked forward to the day he would come back home. 

Kabureme’s husband, who was a civil servant at the time, said goodbye to his family and left to fight for his country.

At only 34 years of age, Kaburame had to take over as the breadwinner of the family. As a woman in charge, she had to make serious decisions; the first being to forget the luxury of renting a big house in Jinja town, Uganda. 

With a family to feed and no job, Kabureme needed a miracle to pull through. Luckily, Abambay’impumbya, now called Benishyaka, an association that had been formed to unite women whose husbands had joined the liberation struggle, stepped in and helped her with some financial assistance which enabled her to start a small business. 

"I started with brewing waragi, a local brew which I would sell and this kept my family afloat for several years,” she says.

Later, Kabureme moved to Kampala where she started dealing in second hand clothes.  The clothes business kept her family going and helped put her children through school, a feat that she says would never have been possible if it wasn’t partly thanks to the school administration’s patience, which allowed her to pay school fees in instalments.  

In the meantime, she continued to follow the liberation war and her husband in particular but never got to know the details. She never got any communication from her husband.  In 1994, just after RPA had captured Kigali, Kabureme made the long journey to Rwanda to look for her husband.

 "I used to inquire about my husband all the time but it was really difficult to get information about him. So, when the struggle was over in 1994, I decided to come to Rwanda thinking I was going to meet him again,” she says.

Unfortunately, after asking around for several days, she was informed by some of her husband’s battalion members that he had died in 1991 in an area called Murugano.  With the devastating news, she headed back to Uganda where she dreaded the moment when she would tell her children that the father that they had looked forward to seeing again was gone forever. The news devastated her children, especially the older ones, for a long time.  

 Kabureme, who initially supported her husband’s decisions, mainly because she longed to come back to Rwanda after being forced into exile twice, started working on her family’s return back home. 

The decision to relocate back to Rwanda was a difficult one but not hers to make alone. 

"Moving my children to Rwanda was a difficult choice to make especially because they were in secondary school at the time but they insisted that they needed to see the country their father had died fighting for,” she recalls.

While her family has tried to move on with their lives, Kaburame says that there are still many moments when she hopes that her husband will walk through the door.

"I think I still subconsciously feel that one day I will get to see him, maybe because we never got the chance to give him a decent burial. There are times when my son walks into the house talking and I rush out of the door thinking it’s my husband because they sound the same,” Kabureme says sadly.

Benishyaka; where women took matters into their hands

When the Rwanda Liberation war kicked off on October 1, as expected, those whose loved ones had joined the noble cause were left with mixed emotions; excitement on one hand, and anxiety on the other. While it was exciting that a campaign aimed at liberating Rwandans had been launched,  no one was blind to the fact that it was a matter of life and death, the latter being a bigger possibility. After all, this was war.

To curb all this anxiety, Rwandan women whose husbands and children had joined the liberation war started meeting and talking and that is how Benishyaka Association was born.

 The current president of Benishyaka Association, Jane Abatoni Gatete, says that though the idea was born in 1990, the association was officially established in 1994 to find solutions to challenges widows and orphans of the liberators were facing.   

Originally the concept of helping vulnerable women started when we were still in exile, just when our husbands had joined the liberation struggle in 1990. At the time, the association was actually called ‘Abambay’impumbya’. 

"At the time, women would visit each other and help each other find ways to take care of their families,” Gatete says.

At the time of inception, it was made up of 18 members though they are currently 40.

The association members offered each other moral and financial support and it was the way they would also get some news about the children and husbands that were involved in the liberation struggle. 

"It was so abrupt for most people, there were newly married couples and some didn’t know the whereabouts of their husband’s families. There were women who were pregnant at the time and life was so hard since most of them were housewives as their husbands were the bread winners. It was a tough life. So forming the association was a way of dealing with the problems collectively,” Gatete reveals.

She further says that on coming back to Rwanda in 1994, the problems doubled because most of the women discovered that their husbands had lost their lives during the war.

"On reaching Rwanda in 1994, we discovered we could not be called Abambayimpumbya which means "same spirit with our husbands and sons” since the liberation struggle had ended and that’s when we decided to call the association Benishyaka. We not only took on widows and orphans of liberators in particular but others in general,” Gatete says.

Gatete also says that the association has been able to help the widows and orphans to deal with most of the problems based on the variety of projects that the association has been involved in over the last 20 years.

Beninshyaka’s projects

So far, more than 10,300 orphans have benefited from the Benishyaka education programme and most of these have been able to complete university and are now employed in various institutions all over Rwanda.

The Association has also built 112 houses for families in Nyagatare district and invested in agriculture and livestock farming in the same area. Benishyaka association has also constructed a health centre serving more than 13,000 residents of Rukomo sector and also funds various integrated income generating activities in Kirehe, Bugesera, Muhanga districts and Kigali city, according to Betty Gahima, the Executive Secretary of Benishyaka Association.

"Our programmes have been evolving based on the context. We started with emergency programmes like relief programmes which involved providing food then moved to provision of shelter to the most vulnerable women and orphans and then later, we provided education support to orphans.

"For instance here at our headquarters we have tailoring and weaving skills for those widows that hadn’t gotten a chance to go to school. This is to attain skills to start up businesses,” Gahima says.

The association has a variety of partnerships and funders including the, Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion, and many others.

Paul Rukundo, a beneficiary of Benishyaka Association lost his father during the liberation struggle and later his mother died of natural causes. He says that the association started paying his school fees while he was in Senior Three and continued to do so till he finished his A-level. 

He later got a government scholarship which saw him attain his Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration at the School of Finance and Banking (SFB) in June 2012.

"I am currently working for a friend who owns a Branding company. The Benishyaka funding gave me hope for a bright future. Although I have not yet gotten a professional job based on my qualification, I’m hoping to get one and I attribute such an achievement to Benishyaka Association,” Rukundo says.