Running for His Life
Ten years ago, before he came to Texas and established himself as a world-class marathoner, Gilbert Tuhabonye cheated death at the hands of tribal warriors by running for his life. Now he wants you to run for yours.
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Both Rwanda and Burundi became independent in 1962. While the Hutus gained some power in Rwanda, Tutsis controlled the army and the government in Burundi, making occasional attempts at parliamentary elections to give the more numerous Hutus a voice in government. Just before and after independence, ethnic violence flared up, and there were massacres by both sides. In 1972 an attempted coup in Burundi led to the slaughter of some 150,000 Hutus; many Tutsis were killed too, including three of Gilbert's uncles. "Bad teaching," he says about the causes of the violence. "Deep hate." It's a class thing and a race thing, even though both tribes have intermingled for so long that sometimes even Burundians can't tell the difference. But usually they can. A Tutsi, says Gilbert, tends to be tall and thin, with a narrow nose; a Hutu is shorter, more muscular, and has a wider nose. Tutsis complain that Hutus lack ambition; Hutus say Tutsis are arrogant.
At the Kibimba school, Gilbert began running competitively. As a freshman, he won an 8K race running barefoot. The next year, he met a coach who showed him how to run properly—how to get his knees up and how to hold his arms. The coach told Gilbert that if he worked hard, he could make the Olympics. In his junior year, Gilbert was a national champion in the 400 and 800 meters, already a great runner in a country known for producing them. By his senior year, in 1993, all he cared about was school and running. His goal was to get a scholarship to an American college, get an education, and return home. The dream actually seemed possible, since Burundi appeared to have turned a corner on its violent past: The latest Tutsi dictator had mandated the first-ever presidential election, and not surprisingly, a Hutu won. A new day was dawning in Burundi. Four months after the election, though, the president was assassinated by Tutsi soldiers. It was a new day, all right.
"THE NIGHT BEFORE," SAYS GILBERT, "I didn't sleep. I had two tests that day, in chemistry and biology. I was thinking, maybe I studied too hard. It was my senior year, and I had to be prepared for college. That morning I turned on the radio. Nothing. I thought the battery was dead. I went to class, and people started talking about the rumors—usually when the radio isn't working, it's a coup. A friend said there was a putsch, that the president was dead. There weren't many Hutus around, but I saw one, my teammate on the 440 relay. He showed me a machete, pulled it out of its sheath, ran it along his throat, and said, 'Tonight is the night I'm gonna cut your neck.' I said, 'Why?' He said, 'Because you guys killed our president.' I thought he was joking. I found out later that Hutus had been gathering since three in the morning, planning on killing Tutsis. By ten, a mob had gathered at the school—Hutus with machetes. They took away a Tutsi professor and said, 'We're gonna kill all these Tutsis.' I told a professor, a Tutsi, what people were saying. He said, 'Don't worry—they can't do that.'"
Sitting on his flowery couch, Gilbert recounts this story carefully, speaking slowly at some points and excitedly at others, sometimes waving his arms. "Around noon, we went to the principal to ask for help, and he told us, 'You killed the president, and you have to die.' We tried to organize a peaceful running away. We also hoped the army would come. There were hundreds of us marching—girls, boys, teachers, farmers—and we locked our arms together. We didn't get far; the mob stopped us. By then it had started raining. Everywhere we looked, there was a Hutu with a machete, a bow and arrow, or a spear. Some were my friends. They told us to go back to the school. We didn't move. All of a sudden, a woman took a spear and threw it into the crowd. And they attacked us—cutting people, their ears and noses, so they'd know who was a Tutsi.
"Many escaped. I tried to, but they were watching me. They knew I was a cross-country runner, that I could run and tell the soldiers. They got me, and the principal said I'd be the last to die. He said they'd do me like they did Jesus Christ. He said, 'You will see what Jesus saw on the cross.' He meant I was going to get a good torture, like Jesus got. They attached us to each other, one by one, with a rope, by the arms. I said, 'Where are you taking us? I thought we were friends.' 'Not anymore.'
"Kids were bleeding, screaming, crying. My heart was beating like I don't know what, I was so scared. They took us down the hill to a highway gas station owned by a Hutu, a guy I knew—I bought stuff from him all the time. People were all around us, walking next to us, with machetes. They were singing, 'We caught the enemy! We're gonna burn them to death!' When we got there, they took our clothes. All I had on was underwear and a shirt. Before they pushed us inside, they beat every kid on the back of the neck with a big club. They hit hard—to stun or paralyze. Some were killed. I was one of the last ones and jumped inside, but they beat me on the chest so hard that I bled for three weeks.
"There were more than a hundred people in a room this big"—Gilbert points to the kitchen wall on the far side of his living room, a 40- by 25-foot space. "We couldn't move. It was jammed with half-naked people screaming and crying. Outside, they were dancing, clapping, singing, 'We did it!' Just after I got in, they poured gasoline in through the windows—everyone got some on them. I got it on my shirt, so I took it off. Then they threw in branches that were on fire. The flames moved so fast. People were trying to hide and put out the flames. It was horrible. Many were killed by the fire and smoke. The Hutus were waiting outside for us to try to escape, but the doors were thick and we couldn't break out.
"Because I was one of the last in, I was near the wall, banging against it, and I found a door to a kind of closet. I pushed it open, and there were more people in there. I let a few more inside. The Hutus kept throwing lit branches in through a window. I hid under the bodies of my friends. After a couple more hours, I heard a student tell the chemistry professor to get some chemicals to throw inside. The people left were gasping for air. I took a deep breath and was pushing air away from my face."
At this point, the Hutus set fire to the roof, Gilbert caught fire, and he decided to let them kill him. "But something was guiding me," he says. "When I jumped, they were outside, just a few feet away, standing by the fire they'd built under the window. But they didn't see me. As soon as I landed, I couldn't see clearly. The wind was blowing, and it was cold—I was naked. I just started moving and got around the corner. I heard someone shout, 'Gilbert is coming!' I saw a mob of people—they stood up, holding machetes. Everywhere, I saw people coming. I ran downhill. The more I ran, the wind was teasing the fire on my back. Some people were saying, 'Don't worry about him; he's gonna die anyway,' and they gave up. But not everyone. A guy came running at me with a machete. I ducked, and he just missed me and cut his own arm. I kept running, and all of a sudden I fell into a deep ditch filled with rainwater. It put out the fire on my back. I heard people talking, saying, 'Let's catch him. He knows who we are.' I heard this one guy coming—I knew his voice—and he fell into the ditch. I was leaning against the side, and he had a spear in one hand and a machete in the other. I killed him. I have never confessed this before. I was so angry. They had burned me, killed my friends. I had nothing to lose. But I don't think it was me who got that strength. God gives power to eliminate evil."
How exactly did a mild-mannered high school kid kill a man? Gilbert demonstrates—he puts one hand on his chin and the other on the back of his head, jerking and twisting hard, pantomiming the breaking of someone's neck. "I watch Chuck Norris," he says. "Chuck Norris was my favorite. The guy puked on himself, and I knew he was dead."
"The voice in my head said, 'Go away,'" Gilbert continues, "so I got up again. I was so thirsty, so dehydrated, and I started toward the hospital, about a half mile away. It was so hard to move; every step hurt. I could barely stand up. My feet, I could see, were like meat. My right leg was so bad that I could see the bone. I was on my hands and knees, running like a monkey. There were still Hutus everywhere with machetes. The voice was telling me, 'You don't want to die.' My heart was beating so hard that I thought they could hear it. When I got to the hospital, a guy saw me going in and said, 'He runs like a monkey. He's not a human being. He's a spirit.'"
It was all about form—the years on the track, keeping his knees up and his arms back, pushing himself when he thought he was going to die. He stumbled into the sanctuary of the hospital. Soon the soldiers came, and Gilbert, with third-degree burns over 30 percent of his body, was moved to an army hospital; later he recovered in a hospital near his home, where his mother came to visit him. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, she and Gilbert's father had been told that he was dead. Then, later that night, Gilbert's father had been murdered by a Hutu gang on the road. Now, she was told, her son was alive.
"When my mother came to the hospital, I was bandaged everywhere. She said, 'I told you, you are a son of God. If it wasn't for God, you are dead.' It's a shock and also a lesson. It has meaning. I don't think I survived because I'm strong but because of the power of God. God showed up." But what about the others? Surely they were also children of God. Why weren't they spared as well? "That's the thing I didn't understand. Afterward, I asked myself, 'Why me? Why did I survive?'"
In the hospital, he lay on his stomach and left side, pondering the unknowable. When he closed his eyes to sleep, he saw flames and heard screams. He read his Bible. He figured the voice he had heard was God's, but he didn't know why it had spoken only to him. "Why did God want me to survive?"
WHY DO PEOPLE RUN—THAT IS, people who aren't being chased by a fire-throwing, machete-waving mob? Why do thousands get up early on a Sunday morning and put their knees and ankles and hearts and lungs through the hell of 10,000 meters on hard pavement?
There is no single good answer to this question. In high school, people run for glory or for girls (or boys). Maybe they're being punished. Later on, they run for exercise or just to fit into their pants. Eventually, if they're lucky, they tap into another world: the state of physical and mental grace they reach when they're cruising, when their blood is racing through their every vein. Their thoughts have never been clearer, and their limbs are snapping in rhythm; their souls are revealed, and they are striving, excellent souls. They become obsessed with this feeling. They get religious about it. It is, for some of them, as spiritual as they will ever get.
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