What July 4 means in Rwanda

For Rwanda, July 4 is Liberation Day: the day the genocide against the Tutsi was brought to an end after one hundred days of unimaginable darkness. For my family, it is the day hope returned.

On June 27, 1994, my father made one of the hardest decisions of his life.

He left the orphanage.

It was not because he wanted to save himself. In fact, he was leaving to save everyone else.

While searching for assistance through the Red Cross, he learned devastating news. The militia had discovered that he was not only sheltering orphaned children, but had also hidden adults who were fleeing the killings. They now considered him an accomplice. He was warned never to return to the orphanage. If the Interahamwe found him there, they would kill him first and then massacre everyone inside.

This warning came after my father had already made his position unmistakably clear. Whenever the Interahamwe demanded the children, he would answer with unwavering conviction:

“If you want the children, you must begin with me, my wife, my son, and only then can you touch the others.”

When they eventually came looking for him, he was already gone.

My father’s disappearance created a painful mystery. None of us knew where he was. He did not know if he would ever see us again. Even remaining at the Red Cross was dangerous, because it housed many other displaced people. His presence could place them in danger as well.

My father later told me that his heart was racing constantly. His thoughts refused to settle. Every possibility seemed to end in death.

Then an idea came to him.

He remembered St Michel Church in Kigali, where a priest was sheltering children in the church basement. He made his way there, explained his situation, and was welcomed into hiding. Every evening, while the city continued to burn, prayers rose quietly from within the church walls.

It was there that providence placed someone whose courage would forever become part of our family’s story.

An American humanitarian named Carl Wilkens had refused to leave Rwanda when nearly every foreigner was evacuating. Instead, he stayed because he believed the lives of Rwandan children were worth risking his own.

When Carl learned that the orphanage was in grave danger and that my father had been forced into hiding, he made a promise.

He would do everything he could to reunite us.

Before long, my father managed to send a small handwritten note to my mother, asking for a toothbrush and a few personal belongings. It seemed insignificant, but to my mother it meant everything.

Rumors had already spread that my father’s body had been found among the trenches. Some claimed they had seen his severed head.

The note shattered those rumors.

He was alive.

For the first time in days, my mother’s face filled with hope.

Still, the waiting continued.

The days felt endless. Four days stretched into what seemed like years. Every hour carried the same unbearable question:

Would anyone survive?

Years later, I asked my father what had been going through his mind while he waited inside St Michel.

His answer surprised me.

He told me he had become emotionally numb.

Then he quietly admitted something I have never forgotten:

“If they had killed everyone at the orphanage,” he said, “I don’t think I would have continued living. I think I would have died too.”

I paused when he told me that.

In that moment, I understood something about my father that no history book could ever explain.

The orphaned children were not simply his responsibility.

They were his reason for living.

His own family and the hundreds of children under his care had become one family in his heart. To lose them all would have meant losing the very purpose of his existence.

On July 1, Carl Wilkens fulfilled the promise he had made.

Against extraordinary odds, he secured buses and organized the evacuation of everyone from the orphanage to St Michel Church.

When the buses arrived and the children finally saw Papa Damas again, they ran toward him with overwhelming joy.

They hugged him so tightly that they knocked him to the ground.

For a brief moment, in the middle of genocide, there was laughter.

There were embraces.

There was relief.

It was not yet the end.

But we were together again.

Two days later, on July 4, 1994, the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) secured Kigali and stopped the genocide.

My father often remembered watching a military convoy pass by St Michel Church. Among those leading it was Paul Kagame, who later became Rwanda’s president. As the convoy moved through the streets, they waved toward those sheltering inside.

No words were needed.

The message was unmistakable: It is over.

Every year afterward, my father called me on July 4.

“Patrick,” he would say, “today is the day the darkness ended.”

Those annual phone calls became more than a remembrance. They were a celebration of survival, of reunion, and of gratitude—for those who protected life when hatred sought to destroy it.

Today, my father is no longer here to make that call.

I miss it deeply.

I probably always will.

But every July 4, I remember not only the liberation of a nation.

I remember the courage of a father who refused to abandon his children.

I remember a mother whose hope returned with a simple handwritten note.

I remember the embrace that knocked Papa Damas to the ground.

And I remember Carl Wilkens, whose extraordinary courage helped give us back our family and our future.

Liberation Day is not only the story of how the killing stopped.

For us, it is the story of how love survived.

Patrick Rutikanga is the Executive Director of Gisimba Memorial Center in Kigali. He is writing a book, to be published by Blue Ear Books, about generational trauma and recovery in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.