The Woman Who Pretended to be a Witch, Saved More Than 100 Lives

In the spring of 1994, as Rwanda descended into one of the 20th century's fastest and most brutal genocides, an elderly widow in the village of Musamo, in what is now Ruhango District, turned the one thing her neighbours feared about her into a weapon against the killing. Zura Karuhimbi let the militias believe she was a witch. It was, by every account, the lie that saved more than a hundred lives.

Karuhimbi came from a family of traditional healers, and had spent decades cultivating a reputation in her community for having mystical powers, the kind of local folklore that earns an old woman both respect and a wide berth. When the genocide against the Tutsi began in April 1994, with Interahamwe militias moving from house to house across the country, Karuhimbi did not flee and she did not hide. She opened her home.

Over the course of the genocide, she is believed to have sheltered more than 100 people inside her small, two-room house, and reportedly in a hole dug into a nearby field, Tutsis fleeing the killing, Burundian refugees, and even three Europeans caught in the violence. Among those she took in were infants, some of them, according to accounts of her life, rescued directly from the arms of mothers who had already been killed. Every person she sheltered survived.

What she did next is the part of her story that has made her a figure of fascination well beyond Rwanda. To keep the militias away from her door, Karuhimbi leaned fully into the fear her reputation already inspired. She painted herself and the walls of her house with irritant herbs, designed to sting or burn anyone who touched them. She told the men who came looking for Tutsis that her home was haunted, inhabited by ghosts who would turn on anyone foolish enough to cross her threshold. She shook her arms, heavy with bracelets, and warned would-be killers that if they harmed her or anyone inside, they would be "digging their own graves." When militia members offered her bribes to let them search the house, she refused, understanding, correctly, that money meant nothing against the fear she had spent a lifetime building.

It worked. Time and again, armed men who showed no hesitation elsewhere turned away from Karuhimbi's door, unwilling to risk whatever curse the old woman might bring down on them.

It was not the first time she had used performance and cunning to protect a life. Karuhimbi later said that during an earlier wave of ethnic violence, the 1959 Rwandan Revolution, she disguised a two-year-old Tutsi boy as a girl, adorning him with beads from her own necklace to help him escape detection. She claimed, in later years, that the child she saved that day grew up to become Paul Kagame, the man who would go on to lead the Rwandan Patriotic Front and eventually become Rwanda's president, though this claim rests on her own account rather than independent verification.

Karuhimbi survived the genocide and lived for more than two decades afterward, identifying as a practising Muslim and explaining that the witchcraft she performed had been theatre, a defensive invention built entirely to save lives rather than any genuine claim to supernatural power. In 2006, President Kagame awarded her Rwanda's Campaign Against Genocide Medal, recognition she reportedly wore constantly for the rest of her life. Despite the honour, she remained poor, living out her final years in the same modest, deteriorating home in which she had once hidden a hundred strangers from death.

She died on 17 December 2018, at around 93 years old, cared for in her final days by a niece. Her story has since been told in documentary and short film, including Bazigaga, which drew international attention and Oscar consideration, introducing a new generation to a woman who understood, in the middle of a genocide, that sometimes the most powerful thing you can be is the thing people are too afraid to touch.

Karuhimbi's story endures as one of the genocide's most striking examples of ordinary defiance, a reminder that resistance to mass violence did not only come from the organised or the armed, but sometimes from a widow with a reputation, a field with a hole in it, and the nerve to let people believe what frightened them most.