Buried at 14, She Survived to Warn the World

On a Saturday in May 1994, fourteen-year-old Frida Umuhoza lay face down in a shallow ditch in rural Rwanda, her cheek pressed into the soil, her legs trapped beneath the weight of her relatives’ bodies. Around her, neighbors she once greeted daily had finished their work and were moving on.

Before the blows began, she had been offered a choice of how she wanted to die.

“It could be a machete, a club, a knife, a spear, or a big tree with nails,” she recalls. “But there was no gun, and even if there was, we couldn’t afford it anyways.” She chose the club.

That moment—one girl in a ditch, surrounded by a community turned against itself—turned “genocide” from an abstract word into a series of sounds and images that never leave, children screaming, “Please forgive me. I will never be a Tutsi again.” A mother’s head hacked from her body. A beloved grandfather, Bible in hand, asking, “Why are you doing this to us?” before a club silenced him.

Thirty-two years later, in Harare, Zimbabwe, on Tuesday 7 April, Frida’s story was shown as a video testimony—one among thousands—at the heart of a global commitment that the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda will be remembered truthfully, taught honestly, and never allowed to be denied or repeated.

“We gather today, here in Harare, united in sorrow and in resolve,” said Mr. Edward Kallon, the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator, at the 32nd Commemoration of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. “More than a million people were murdered… Entire families were erased. Communities that had lived side by side for generations were torn apart by a brutality that still defies understanding.” Frida’s was one of those families.

“Stand up. You are Tutsi.”

From the outside, her childhood looked ordinary, a businessman father, a mother raising six children—three sons and three daughters—in a home shaped by faith and hard work.

“I had no idea I was a Tutsi until I started school at the age of six,” Frida says.

One day, a teacher entered with a registration book and asked how many Hutus and how many Tutsis were in the classroom. Frida didn’t know where she belonged. A friend leaned over and whispered the words that would define her life: “Stand up. You are Tutsi.”

“Since then,” she says, “I knew that I was referred to as a cockroach and a snake—less than a human being.”

At the Harare commemoration, Mr. Kallon described how this dehumanization was weaponized. A radio journalist “allowed his microphone to become a weapon,” he said, using “inyenzi”—cockroaches—to make murder “thinkable, then acceptable, then routine.”

For Frida, the violence did not begin with machetes. It began with language—in a classroom, and later on the airwaves.

In 1990, the private radio station RTLM began broadcasting hate speech. “It was purposely there to plant and put hate speech on the radio,” she remembers. Lists followed. “Our friends also told us, from school, that we were on the list of the people that are supposed to die.”

Killings had already started in parts of the country. Her father was arrested, accused of supporting the Rwandan Patriotic Front. His business was crippled by restrictions. Fear settled into the family’s daily life.

When President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down in April 1994, Frida says, the radio announced the killing should begin. “We already knew that machetes had been supplied in all the villages.”

“You were killed by a friend, a neighbor.”

In her region, the massacres began later—around the third week of April. Frida’s mother split the family into small groups to hide. Frida, her sister and a cousin were sent to a neighbor’s house; others fled into the bushes.

“We’d been running for weeks and weeks,” she says.

Then, in May, the killers changed tactics. An announcement went out, the killing had stopped; people could return home. It was a lie. “We went back home, but there was no home to go back to,” Frida says. “My home was demolished.”

They made their way to her grandfather’s house. He was a respected teacher, “a really wonderful man in the community.” He was still alive, but only because his captors had decided to let him die slowly—without food or water—after they killed everyone else.

For a brief moment, hope returned. Frida’s mother arrived with her brothers and two boys she had been sheltering. Her father, recently released, returned that same week. “I was very happy to see my whole family still alive,” Frida says.

It didn’t last.

They were rounded up and taken to a roadblock with other Tutsi families. In Frida’s area, even death had a price. “To be shot was an expensive death, you had to pay for it,” she says. They couldn’t. Asked for a grenade, her grandfather explained they had no money. They were sent home with the message understood: cheaper methods would do.

On the day of the president’s burial, the killers came.

Early that morning, Frida heard children screaming at neighbors: “Please forgive me. I will never be a Tutsi again.” “Very little children,” she says, “who believed that the worst crime they had ever committed was being a Tutsi.” Then it was their turn.

The ditch

Eighteen people were in her grandfather’s house: grandparents, aunts, siblings, cousins, her mother. One younger sister had been killed earlier. Her father, certain he would be targeted first, had hidden for weeks on the roof, listening.

They were driven to a prepared ditch. “When we got there, it was all our friends and our neighbors,” Frida says. “You weren’t killed by people from so far away. You were killed by a friend, a neighbor, someone that you’ve loved.”

Frida had already decided how she would die. She asked a young man she knew—John—who held a club, to kill her with it.

As the blows fell, she saw her mother’s head chopped off near her brothers. “When I saw that, I covered my head with a hoodie,” she says. Then the club hit the back of her head. She lost consciousness.

When she woke, she was beneath a pile of bodies. The killers were already filling the ditch. “Everybody had died,” she says. Her sister beside her was still alive—briefly—then took her last breath.

She was fourteen, bleeding, pinned under roughly fifteen corpses, and buried.

“At the age of 14, you really don’t understand everything,” she says. “But I then started thinking, maybe my dad will come down and dig me out.”

She didn’t know that from the roof her father had watched the murder of his wife, children and extended family—then climbed down and offered himself to be killed. As Frida screamed under the soil, the killers celebrated his death. “I lost hope,” she says.

A neighbor heard her. A woman nearby caught the sound of her crying and fetched help. “The young man who dug me out was a young man who had worked for my grandfather,” Frida says. Later, a Hutu man hid her until RPF forces reached the village and the slaughter ended.

“I was a broken girl,” she says. “I was traumatized for a very long time… deep inside, I was lost.”

“It is as if it happened yesterday”

In Harare, officials returned again and again to the fact that time does not dissolve this pain. Rwanda’s Ambassador to Zimbabwe, His Excellency James Musoni, who is also the Dean of Diplomatic Corps said the trauma remains vivid and survivors continue to bear physical and emotional scars.

Frida put it more starkly, survivors are still suffering—depression, anxiety, nightmares. Women raped and infected with HIV/AIDS still need help. “It is not enough to remember the dead; we must protect the living,” Mr. Kallon said, echoing the UN Secretary-General. Prevention means rejecting incitement, investing in social cohesion, and strengthening institutions that stop mass atrocities.

Zimbabwe’s government, in a keynote address delivered by Chief Director Mr. M Chigiji on behalf of Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Minister Honorable Professor Amon Murwira, tied the commemoration to constitutional obligations to promote regional and international solidarity and to participate in organizations that stand for humanity’s well-being. The message emphasized Rwanda’s resilience and the difficult work of reconciliation as proof of what determined rebuilding can achieve.

Naming the crime—and confronting denial

Mr. Kallon noted that in 2018 the UN General Assembly amended its language to explicitly recognize the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, closing space for denial, distortion, and equivocation. “This clarity matters,” he said. “Naming the crime accurately is the first defense against its repetition.”

Ambassador Musoni warned that denial and “genocide ideology” now spread rapidly through digital platforms, and called for decisive measures - confronting hate speech, ensuring perpetrators are brought to justice, and refusing to allow those responsible for grave crimes to live freely while spreading division.

Frida’s appeal is simpler—and harder. “We all have that responsibility of fighting against that ideology,” she insists. “It’s not easy when you’ve lost everything you’ve loved and known.”

Genocide as a chain of choices

Mr. Kallon called it organized and planned—driven by political leaders who chose division, commanders who turned institutions into instruments of slaughter, administrators who used lists and identity papers as tools of death, media voices that poisoned the public sphere, and leaders who stayed silent when their moral authority was needed most.

But even in Frida’s story, the same society that produced killers also produced rescuers: the woman who heard her under the soil, the young man who dug her out, the man who hid her until liberation. “Genocide is not inevitable,” Mr. Kallon said. “It is built, step by step. And it can be prevented, step by step.”

Prevention begins long before the first machete is raised - challenging dehumanizing jokes, resisting scapegoating, defending inclusive institutions and independent courts, upholding rights, and acting early when hate speech and targeted violence rise.

From the podium, Mr. Kallon assigned responsibility widely. “First, to governments and political leaders,” Mr. Kallon said, “you carry the primary responsibility… to protect your populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.” That means inclusive institutions, security forces that protect rather than prey on citizens, independent courts, open civic space and honest addressing of historical grievances.

To security institutions, he was blunt: “‘Following orders’ is no defense for participation in genocide or crimes against humanity.” Early warning requires monitoring hate speech, militias and targeted violence—and acting on them.

To educators and cultural leaders, “Genocide begins in the mind before it is carried out by the hand. You shape how young people understand ‘us’ and ‘them.’ You decide whether history is told honestly… or manipulated to sow new hatred.”

To media professionals, “Today, digital platforms can spread dehumanizing language and incitement faster and further than ever before.” Societies, he argued, need “responsible journalism, ethical communication, and media literacy” that can distinguish hate speech from legitimate debate.

Religious and traditional leaders, Mr. Kallon noted, carry “enormous weight” in tense moments, and young people “are not only the ‘leaders of tomorrow;’ you are shapers of today’s social media spaces, community initiatives, and civic movements.”

But his final appeal was to everyone.

“Genocide does not begin with mass killings,” he said. “It begins with whispered slurs, with jokes that demean, with rumors that paint neighbors as enemies. Every time we refuse to laugh at a dehumanizing joke; every time we defend someone who is targeted because they are different… every time we speak out against corruption, discrimination and abuse – we are acting as agents of prevention.”

Remember, unite, renew

The commemoration theme—“Remember, Unite, Renew”—ran through the ceremony and through Frida’s life. Rwanda’s post-genocide progress, speakers said, shows what a country can build after near-total destruction. 

As the ceremony closed, Mr. Kallon offered a final standard - remember faithfully and without distortion, listen to survivors as a moral compass, and act—in institutions and in everyday life. “‘Never again’ must be more than a slogan,” he said. “It must be the standard by which we measure our laws, our leaders, and ourselves.”

For Frida, that standard began with a teacher’s roll call and a radio’s lies, and ended in a ditch filled with bodies. Her survival—and her decision to speak—insists on a final question, from Harare to Kigali and beyond: will the world truly hear, and act, step by step, before the next ditch is dug?