Et tu, Brute: Personal Reflections on the Life and Death of Col. Tom Byabagamba
I first met Tom Byabagamba in 1990, on the battlefield that would determine Rwanda’s fate and consume many lives. We were young, shaped by exile, exclusion and longing for home. We imagined a transformed society and state in which refugeehood and political alienation would no longer define the Rwandan condition. Tom was much younger than me. I came to regard him as a younger brother, a comrade-in-arms, and also family through blood relations.
As I reflected on his life last night, seven scenes returned to me.
Scene One: Chicago, June 11, 2011. President Kagame was inside the Hyatt Regency attending Rwanda Day. I was outside among Rwandans protesting the human-rights policies of his government. Some hardcore RPF supporters taunted me. Tom stood with the presidential security detail, watching with a sullen, stern face. I walked toward him and extended my hand. He accepted it without a word. That was the last time I saw him alive. Two former comrades stood only feet apart, yet history had placed us in different places.
Scene Two: Kigali, 2000. I was President Kagame’s Chief of Staff; Tom headed presidential security. We worked around the clock—he on the President’s physical security, I on the strategic, political and administrative business of the presidency. One night, past midnight, we supervised casual laborers planting grass around the newly built presidential residence. Kagame wanted his family to move in by Christmas. Two veterans of war stood in the darkness worrying about grass and a deadline. Nation-building sometimes wears ordinary clothes.
Scene Three: January 16, 2001. We had been meeting at the RPF Secretariat when General James Kabarebe told us President Laurent Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo had been assassinated. Afterward Tom and I walked together. He stopped and asked: “Ariko abatavuga rumwe natwe bose tuzajya tubica?” Shall we always kill all who disagree with us? I did not answer. But his question was already inside me.
Scene Four: another morning in Nyarutarama. Tom and I were surveying a site for an underground bunker and residence for President Kagame. Hungry, Tom bought sweet bananas, placed them on the trunk of his jeep and invited me to our improvised breakfast. Power and security—and two hungry comrades eating bananas from a vehicle.
Scene Five: Addis Ababa, 1992. I am driving. Then Major Paul Kagame sits beside me. Tom and another colleague sit behind us as we head to the Addis Hilton for our first formal meeting between the RPF and an American delegation. We believed history was opening before us.
Scene Six is gentler. Our families were housed in Nyarutarama, close to President Kagame’s lodge. I remember our children playing together. Before titles, trials, prisons and estrangement, there were families living near one another, children making their own world while their fathers helped build another one.
Scene Seven: near the end of my ambassadorial duties in Washington, I visited Tom while he was admitted at King Faisal Hospital in Kigali. On his bedside was Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. We talked for a while. I picked up the book and read Law 1: “Never Outshine the Master.” Tom smiled. It was a small moment between friends. Looking back, the irony is difficult to miss.
Tom was later arrested, tried by a military court and sentenced to 21 years, reduced on appeal to 15. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention subsequently found his detention arbitrary and identified serious fair-trial concerns, including access to counsel, tribunal impartiality, limits on cross-examination and equality of arms. Rwanda’s government rejected that conclusion and maintained that the proceedings complied with national law and international standards.
Then Tom died in prison. His family said it had not been given a cause of death when his death became known. An independent investigation should ask: When was he last seen alive and well? What illnesses did he have? What treatment did he receive? Who attended him during his final hours? Was an autopsy performed, and what did it establish? Why, according to the family, was viewing of the body restricted? What happened between his death and the handing over of his coffin? These questions require evidence, not speculation.
The last image I carry is Tom’s coffin in church, his wife Mary and their sons Brian and Allen bidding him farewell. Absent was the political, military and governmental family to which he had once belonged, which he had served, protected and helped build.
A boy born and raised in a refugee camp answered the call to fight for a homeland. He devoted most of his adult life to protecting the state and its head. He then died in that state’s prison, perhaps more alienated than when he lived in exile. What does that trajectory tell us about revolutions, loyalty, power, nation-building and the lessons we Rwandans have learned—or failed to learn—from history?
Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” warns that grave wrongs need not depend only upon monsters. They can become possible when ordinary people surrender judgment, institutions normalize what conscience should resist, and silence becomes easier than truth. Tom’s life therefore leaves me asking not only what kind of state we co-created, but what kind of society we have become.
Jesus wept over Jerusalem in Matthew 23:37 because he loved it. Those who love Rwanda must retain the capacity to lament Rwanda. Matthew 10:28 reminds us that those who can kill the body cannot command the soul. Mark 8:36 asks what it profits a person to gain the whole world and lose his soul. And Wole Soyinka warned: “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.”
Tom has died. The question for those of us who remain is whether something in us dies with him—or whether memory, truth and courage can yet help us build the Rwanda we once believed we were fighting for.