It’s been five years into marriage for Gilbert Kabeja and Vestina Mugayinka, during which the couple begot two children and endured endless anxiety because they have had to fight off disapprovals from their relatives.

Kabeja is a Tutsi, Mugayinka a Hutu, and in their defiance, they aver that intermarriages between the two so-called ethnic groups is one of the main ways to reconcile the Rwandan society that was torn apart for decades leading up to the slaughter of Tutsi in 1994.

"I lost my father and many relatives during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi and lived a hopeless life for years until I joined Reach, Unity and Reconciliation programmes that really worked for me,” Kabeja said at their home village in Nyagatovu, Kayonza District on Tuesday.

Reach is a local non-profit organisation founded to improve the lives of children and youth.

"I witnessed gruesome scenes during the Genocide that still depresses me to-date, so I nursed a grudge and hated every single Hutu to the extent that I fought them in bars and on streets.

However, my few days in the Reach programme of reconciliation made me a different person,” Kabeja narrates.

He says the troubling times coincided with his budding love for Mugayinka; the love was the turning point that brought tolerance, reconciliation and hope to his life.

"Unfortunately, my relatives–survivors of the Genocide–saw me as a traitor. A Tutsi man in an intimate relationship with a Hutu woman; they reminded me that people killed mine just a few years earlier,” he says.

His love stoked the ire of his extended family, Kabeja says. He was almost ex-communicated. His clan refused to give him dowry and offer any hand in wedding expenses.

"None of them attended my wedding ceremony, a strange thing in Rwandan culture, but I wasn’t that much bothered by their attitude. I guess I had crossed the Rubicon of love,” he says.

Kabeja silently went about the challenge he was facing, giving away almost nothing to his wife-to-be, little did he know that Mugayinka, too, was under pressure from her family to call time on the relationship.

The couple decided to go ahead despite the resistance from both sets of relatives.

"I had no money to pay dowry, but I was given the girl and we got married,” he says.

Today, he says, his wife is the best friend of his mother.

"We are now consultants as far as unity and reconciliation through intermarriages is concerned. Couples facing problems just like I did consult me and I advise them,” Kabeja boasts.

He contends that he never perceives his wife as a girl born of ‘killers’.

"I only saw her as a beautiful, lovely girl, who found herself in family that committed genocide crimes. This is my guiding principle, the one that has helped me teach others how to bury the artificial differences, to live peacefully as wife and husband irrespective of whether you were born a Tutsi or Hutu,” he says.

Mugayinka said she was shocked by resistance to their relationship because she had fallen in love with the man without even asking whether he was a Tutsi or Hutu.

"I was greatly disturbed by what my boyfriend went through then. I didn’t know what to do. My parents never got involved in the Genocide, but some of my close relatives were involved and are in jail,” she says.

Mugayinka says her aunts always told her not to trust her husband, alleging he was tricking her into a revenge trap.

"I didn’t give in to their attempts to dissuade me to abandon him and here we are in joy with our lovely children. I didn’t know all this [other people’s crimes] would be associated with me until I was engaged with Gilbert,” she says.

Mugayinka believes they have succeeded because they never gave critics and those who were against their marriage a chance.

I was as strong as my husband; today we live happily, she said.

Mugayinka also believes that young people who have decided to intermarry should be encouraged to do it freely as part of wider efforts to reconcile the Rwandan society, which was deeply divided along ethnic lines by colonialists and post-independence leadership.

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