At great personal risk, she sheltered Tutsi neighbors in her small two-room home, smuggled them to safety across Lake Kivu, and repeatedly defied both local militias and her own husband’s fears. Her actions resulted in the survival of at least 12 people, according to accounts from survivors and journalists’ research. Today, her story remains an inspiring reflection of moral courage in extreme danger.
Born and raised in a rural community near Lake Kivu, Josephine lived a life marked by poverty long before the genocide began. In 1994, she shared a modest two-room house with her husband and children. The family farmed small plots of beans and sorghum and possessed only minimal livestock. Their poverty would later become an unexpected form of protection: Josephine later explained that because the family owned so little, militias did not consider them likely to shelter anyone. Their home was also situated near a military barracks, an area that became one of the first to witness violence after the death of President Juvénal Habyarimana on April 6, which ignited the genocide. Josephine did not hear the news immediately; she later recalled that her family didn’t have a radio and only learned of events when soldiers appeared the next morning and began burning Tutsi homes in the vicinity.
On April 7, 1994, Josephine encountered a Tutsi man seeking refuge and brought him into her home. Shortly afterward, she saw another man in need and took him in as well. Although fully aware of the danger, Josephine believed her responsibility was to act, even when she did not yet know how she would protect them. She feared how her husband might react, but she managed the situation with quick thinking and humor. Before he entered the house, she distracted him by claiming—falsely—that these men came to see him, which caused him to panic that someone else would notice them and push them into a room before he had time to process and protest.
Josephine soon realized that merely hiding people was not enough; she needed to get them out of the area entirely. She knew Lake Kivu provided a route to safety, but she had no canoe. A cousin owned one, but he demanded payment. With no money, Josephine arranged for someone literate to draft a contract trading her goats for temporary access to the boat. That night, she guided the two men to the lakeshore and sent them off under cover of darkness toward relative safety.
A week later, another family, a Tutsi man with two daughters, arrived at her door. Her husband protested strongly this time, warning that harboring Tutsis could lead to their deaths. Josephine, however, insisted on continuing to aid those at risk. She responded to his objections by reminding him that the people they sheltered were human beings and that choosing to help them was, in her view, a moral responsibility. Once again, she confronted the immediate challenge of securing a boat. Searching the lakeshore, she came upon a metal canoe, chained and belonging to a known genocide perpetrator. Stealing it would be extraordinarily dangerous, yet she thought she had no other choice.
Her plan required not only courage but also coordination. After nightfall, Josephine brought her children to the lake and instructed them to splash and play noisily in the water to create a distraction. As they did so, one child attempted to saw through the chain, then another. When the chain remained intact, Josephine took over, managing to break it with a single decisive cut. She then returned home, handed paddles to the man and his daughters, encouraged the girls with reassurances of their strength, and reminded them that they had no choice but to reach the opposite shore before daylight. With little food available beyond soybeans, she instructed them to eat what she could offer and drink lake water as they traveled. After praying together, she sent them off.
Over the course of the hundred-day genocide, Josephine repeated this pattern multiple times: identifying men, women, or children in danger, hiding them from militias searching house to house, and organizing their escape across the lake. Not all survived, but many did. Estimates from survivors and organizations documenting rescuer stories converge around a minimum of twelve lives saved due to her actions. Her husband, though frightened, ultimately assisted in small ways; he was wounded during this period and later died from those injuries, underscoring the immense personal cost the family bore.
After the genocide ended, Josephine resumed a quiet life in Kibuye. She worked as a farmer, maintaining the same modest lifestyle she had known before the violence. Some of the people she rescued sought her out in later years, offering gifts—a cow, repairs to her home, even an electricity connection—as gestures of gratitude for acts they considered impossible to repay. For Josephine, her actions were rooted in a simple refusal to be complicit in brutality and a belief that maintaining one’s dignity requires moral action, even when the cost is high.