The forgotten Batwa/1

Rwanda. ZANIKA UWAJENEZA, 17 years old, orphan, the eldest sibling of a large family with 9 children. Her mother died after a car clash at night in the Musanze district. The Batwa are 1% of Rwanda’s population and 10,000 were killed by Hutu during the ethnic cleansing because they were thought to be friends of the Tutsi and another 10,000 fled the region at the time.They are the invisible forgotten minority and the injustice they suffer is still present, and regardless of Rwanda’s integration policy the Batwa people are still considered a pariah. Between 2006 and 2010 the ancient region of lakes and forests where the Batwa lived have been converted in tourism attraction sites because of the presence of gorillas. Batwa land has been confiscated and they now live in extremely poor conditions, usually  surviving by harvesting the land of others or crafting small ceramic objects for the tourism industry.