Rwanda’s Minister of National Unity and Civic Engagement, alongside ambassadors and senior officials, traveled to Nyanza District today to lay wreaths at the Mwima Mausoleum, Queen Gicanda’s final resting place on Mwima hill, where she lies beside her husband, King Mutara III Rudahigwa.
The ceremony is one of the most personal within Rwanda’s Kwibuka calendar: not a national stadium, not a televised address, just officials, clergy, family, and flowers at a hillside tomb.
Every year on April 20, relatives, friends and officials gather at her tomb to pay their respects.
Queen Gicanda was not just a historical figure, She was a symbol of what the genocide deliberately targeted
On April 20, 1994, Interahamwe militia murdered Her Majesty Rosalie Gicanda at her home in Nyanza District, during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. She had received threatening phone calls in the days prior and sought protection from local authorities, but was turned away.
Soldiers invaded her home, abducted her and six others, and killed them behind the Ethnographic Museum.
She was 66 years old, and Her death sent a message that no one was exempt, not even Rwanda’s most revered woman.
Her story carried one more dimension this year
The 2025 commemoration of Queen Gicanda took on added significance following the arrest of Brigadier General Jean Baptiste Gakwerere, one of the queen’s alleged killers, a reminder that accountability, even three decades on, remains unfinished business.
In 2012, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda had already convicted Captain Ildephonse Nizeyimana for his role in Queen Gicanda’s murder, but the pursuit of those responsible has not stopped there.
Rwanda’s official Kwibuka 32 week opened on April 7 at the Kigali Genocide Memorial and closed on April 13 with a national call for unity, responsible leadership, and vigilance against divisive ideologies.
But today’s visit to Mwima shows that remembrance in Rwanda doesn’t end when the official week closes. It continues quietly, consistently on the dates that matter most. April 20 is one of them.
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