Cyprian and Daphrose Rugamba

Cyprien Rugamba (often given as Cyprian in English) and Daphrose Rugamba were a Rwandan Catholic husband and wife whose lives joined cultural work, a late conversion of their marriage, and death at the outset of the 1994 genocide. Cyprien, born in 1935, was a poet, composer, and choreographer who spent much of his public career collecting, staging, and transmitting Rwandan traditional song, dance, and poetry, including through national cultural institutions connected with the country’s ballet and arts administration. Daphrose, born in 1944, was a practising Catholic. They married and had ten children, but for a long period the household was broken: Cyprien lived apart from Christian practice and was unfaithful, while Daphrose remained in the marriage and prayed for his conversion and for the healing of the family.

In 1989 Cyprien underwent a profound conversion. He was reconciled with the Catholic Church and with his wife, and their marriage was restored on the basis of a shared faith. The couple was then drawn into the Emmanuel Community, an international Catholic community of pontifical right that unites lay people, consecrated members, and priests around eucharistic adoration, compassion for the poor, and evangelization. In the early 1990s they helped establish that community in Rwanda. From their home in Kigali they received people in need, including street children, and Cyprien put his gifts as a writer and musician at the service of prayer and catechesis. In a period of rising ethnic and political tension they were known for speaking of reconciliation and of the equal dignity of all Rwandans.

On 7 April 1994, the day after the attack that killed President Juvénal Habyarimana, organized massacres began in Kigali. Militiamen of the Interahamwe came to the Rugamba house and killed Cyprien and Daphrose together with six of their ten children. The children who were not in the house at the time survived. Their deaths belong to the opening hours of the genocide against the Tutsi and to the killing of many who were identified with a Christian witness of unity rather than with the ideology of the killers. Later testimony, gathered in the Church and in the Emmanuel Community, remembers them as having remained together and as having been slain for who they were and for the faith they had come to share.

After 1994 their surviving children and the Emmanuel Community kept their memory. A cause of beatification for Cyprien and Daphrose Rugamba, and for the children murdered with them, was opened in the Archdiocese of Kigali; they are therefore called Servants of God. They have not been beatified or canonized, and they have no universally assigned feast day or official patronages. They are remembered in Rwanda and in the wider Catholic charismatic movement as an example of a healed marriage, of the evangelization of culture, and of lay fidelity unto death at the end of the twentieth century. Some private details of their family life and of the exact course of the attack rest on post-genocide testimony and should be treated with corresponding caution.