Immaculée Ilibagiza grew up in Mataba, a rural town in Rwanda, surrounded by family. Life there was peaceful until April 1994, when Ilibagiza came home from university for Easter, and everyday existence became a nightmare.
The assassination of Rwanda’s president, a member of the Hutu tribe, sparked months of massacres of Tutsi tribe members, including Ilibagiza’s family. She escaped the violence by hiding for 91 days, along with seven other Tutsi women, crammed into a 3 x 4-foot room in the home of a local Hutu pastor.
Living in fear, she returned to her childhood prayers and found faith. “I realized that my battle to survive this war would have to be fought inside of me,” she later wrote in her book Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust (2006; rev. 2014).
Ilibagiza immigrated to the United States in 1998 and settled in New York. “I saw Koreans and Indians and Chinese and I thought, ‘Those are not Americans.’ But no, they are Americans; every nationality here is accepted as Americans,” she said. She became a citizen in 2013. As the naturalization ceremony’s keynote speaker, she told her story of survival: “Many people in America do not think suffering is a part of life,” she told her fellow immigrants, but “nobody lives in this world without going through pain.”
Ilibagiza now travels the world with her inspirational message of forgiveness. Translated into more than 30 languages, Left to Tell has won numerous awards, including the Mahatma Gandhi International Award for Reconciliation and Peace, and has been followed by six additional books.
