Overview
Dorcy Rugamba (born 1969) is a Rwandan author, actor, dancer, and stage director. Being a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which his parents and most of his family were murdered, much of his work is focused on this and other genocides. He has also acted in films. He founded the Rwanda Arts Initiative and the Kigali Triennial. His 2024 memoir dedicated to his absent family, Hewa Rwanda, une lettre aux absents is being presented in English translation as a performance accompanied by music, called Hewa Rwanda, Letter to the Absent, premiering in February 2025 at the Adelaide Festival in Australia.
Early life and education
Dorcy Rugamba was born in Rwanda in 1969, the son of Cyprien and Daphrose Rugamba. Cyprien Rugamba (a Hutu man) was a writer, choreographer, composer, and museum curator, and Daphrose was a Tutsi woman. The couple introduced the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and the Emmanuel Community to Rwanda in 1990. Dorcy was introduced to the performing arts by his father. He trained in the Rwandan traditional dance, Intore. He first studied pharmacy at the National University of Rwanda. While Rugamba, aged around 25 at that time, was visiting an aunt in southern Rwanda, at 10am on 7 April 1994 his family home in Kigali was stormed by Hutu militia. This was a day after the assassination of the president, which marked the start of the Rwandan genocide.
Soldiers rounded up everyone in the home at the time: the six children of Cyprien and Daphrose, including two girls aged nine and seven, and their six-year-old cousin, along with a family employee and his parent. They were all killed by machine guns, apart from one of Rugamba's teenage brothers, who had been covered up by the others' bleeding bodies. After the soldiers had left, the boy made his way to the phone and called Rugamba. After being told what had happened, he fled the country, first to Burundi and eventually to Paris, and then later to Belgium. Over 100 days, up to a million people were massacred. Dropping out of his pharmacy degree (which he was not enjoying anyway), Rugamba turned to the performing arts to help him heal and understand what had happened. He studied at the Conservatoire royal de Liège in Belgium, where he won the first prize in dramatic art.
Career
In 1992, Rugamba founded his first theatre and dance company, Isango, in Butare, in the southern province of Rwanda. This work was performed in Rwanda, France, Belgium, England, Japan, and the United States. He also wrote Retour de Kigali. The Rwanda Arts Initiative, founded by Rugamba in 2012, has developed several of his projects. In 2019 he created the opera Umurinzi ("the guardian"), to commemorate 25 years of the Tutsi genocide, and inspired by Rwandan tradition called "Guterekera". Umurunzi was performed at the Kigali Convention Centre. The script is based on testimonies of Genocide survivors. The play was produced in four languages: Kinyarwanda (the official language of Rwanda), English, French, and Kiswahili, an East African language. The opera was also shown on Rwanda Television, and part of it is available on YouTube. By 2019 he had produced seven plays about genocide.
In March 2020, he created Les restes suprêmes, focused on the African heritage of European museums, which he produced and performed at the Dakar Biennale in 2022. In October 2020, at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, he began a collaboration with Mauritanian film director Abderrahmane Sissako to stage the opera Le vol du Boli, with music by English musician Damon Albarn.
Hewa Rwanda
In March 2024, his memoir dedicated to his absent family In June 2024 he presented a performance of the same name at the Großes Haus theatre in Braunschweig, Germany, as part of the Festival Theaterformen, together with Senegalese multi-instrumentalist Majnun, whose name means "madman" in Arabic. ahead of being presented at the Adelaide Festival in Adelaide, Australia, in March 2025. In this work, he uses art as a form of healing. He has written about this work: "While Hewa Rwanda, Letter to the Absent addresses the genocide, questions of mourning, and a family that was nearly annihilated, I primarily wanted it not to be a commemorative text but a hymn to life, so the tone of the text deliberately embraces lightness, humour, poetry, music, and life in all its aspects". The work is a Rwanda Arts Initiative production.
The performance is also being staged three times as part of WOMADelaide, and outdoor festival of music and dance which is part of the Adelaide Festival. In the presentation, he talks about what he learnt from his parents and what he saw, and how long it took him "to accept the unacceptable". By presenting such works, he remains close to those who are absent, honouring their lives and finding beauty and poetry in the world.
Film
Rugamba has also appeared on screen, both as himself and as an actor. He is a narrator in the 2016 feature documentary about his parents, J'entrerai au ciel en dansant (I'll Enter Heaven Dancing). He plays the character of Innocent in the 2021 Afrofuturist film Neptune Frost, co-directed by Rwandan playwright and actress Anisia Uzeyman and American musician and multimedia artist Saul Williams (who wrote the screenplay).
Other activities
In 2012, Rugamba founded the Rwanda Arts Initiative. In February 2024 he founded and became artistic director of the Kigali Triennial, Kigali's inaugural arts market. Rugamba spoke at the ISPA (International Society for the Performing Arts) 2025 New York Congress.
Personal life
Rugamba lives in Brussels and Rwanda.
External links
* * Dorcy Rugamba : "La langue rwandaise est l'art de la maitrise de soi" April 2024. (in French; audio, 57 mins).