“I don’t think I know someone who didn’t lose a family member,” Mazimpaka said. “It was kind of like everyone did.”

Jessica Mwiza, a Rwandan researcher and Ph.D. candidate at the City University of New York and the event’s opening and closing speaker, said the trauma of the genocide has reverberated through generations. Mwiza grew up in the south of France watching her mother grieve the murder of her parents after she had buried them with her own hands upon returning to Rwanda following the genocide.

“When she came back to France, she was not the same person,” Mwiza said. “She was always sad, always sitting on the couch and I lost her a few years after I was nine due to mental health issues because her heart was so broken. The fact that we grew up in the south of France with no Rwandan community, not even Black people around us, was even more difficult. But when I was a kid, I had no understanding of all of this.”

It was not until years later that Mwiza returned to her history, joining nongovernmental organizations focused on helping survivors and organizing events like Kwibuka in France. Her Ph.D. focuses on studying the post-genocide generation in Rwanda — specifically how young people identify themselves, now that the Hutu and Tutsi labels are no longer socially accepted.

The inciting factor of the genocide is often attributed to a plane attack on April 6, 1994 that killed Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira, both of whom were Hutus. However, in her opening speech, Mwiza emphasized the importance of recognizing that racist ideology was first born out of and instrumentalized by colonial powers. Ethnic division was not innate to the Rwandan community but rather a colonial tactic historically used to dominate Rwandans united by the same culture and language, Mwiza explained.

“What followed was the logic of hatred, meticulously reinforced by political, religious, cultural, educational and family discourse,” Mwiza said. “Death [became] a civil service to the nation, the majority of which, back in 1994, considered that taking a life was a positive social value, and that saving the life of a Tutsi constituted a vile complicity.”

As much as Kwibuka is a time for mourning, it is also a time to honor the resilience and steadfastness of survivors and the Rwandan community at large. Nishimwe said the process of sharing her story — to put words to the pain she and so many other women experienced — was not easy, but necessary for her to heal and ensure that the next generation would not allow a genocide like this to happen again.

“The work I’ve done on myself, I’ve been able to love life and see myself as a person who deserves to be happy, and I’m not defined by what happened to me,” Nishimwe said.

For Zora Kings, a second-year Steinhardt graduate student, Kwibuka 31 was her first time attending a Kwibuka. With very little knowledge of the 1994 genocide, Kings said the event, specifically Nishimwe’s testimony, served as an educational experience — one that left her overwhelmed yet incredibly moved by its end.

“It was so inspiring to see her courage, her strength and her positivity,” Kings said. “That was honestly the biggest thing — seeing how she was able to walk away and use this as an opportunity to inspire others. [My friend and I] were talking about how it’d be so easy to just be so hateful and to hold onto that. The fact that her message was encouraging us — all the young people — to not hold on to that hate, to hold on to that positivity, it was very emotional.”

Agnes Kalissa, a member of the Rwandan community in New York City, further emphasized the educational component of Kwibuka as a key aspect of the tradition.

“It happened before I was born, so it’s something that my parents would tell me and my siblings about,” Kalissa said in an interview with WSN. “It’s just really important to keep the memory alive every year, especially through new generations like mine and younger, so that they know about this history.”

In line with Nishimwe and Kayinamura’s calls to action, SPS professor Olajumoke Ayandele, a speaker at the event, left attendees with the message that addressing the genocide requires a continuous refusal to look away. In the midst of increasing denialism of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda as well as ongoing genocides in other parts of the world, Ayandele called on her audience of students, researchers, policymakers and advocates to remain committed to the struggles for education and prevention.

“We are all responsible,” Ayandele said. “We are not powerless. We cannot undo what we saw in 1994, but what we can do is refuse to let inaction be our legacy … Remembrance is not passive, it is active. It asks something of us, so I encourage each one of you to do something about it.”