I am not a religious man, but I know a theology when I see one.The God of Rwanda has a nose. It is high. It is narrow. It is ancestral.

Draft I: Am I a Nose-Watcher?

I Am a Nose Watcher - Gabriel Ndayishimiye

I am a nose-watcher.

I wasn’t born into it, not exactly. I wasn’t measured. I wasn’t labeled. My papers said nothing. I fled the country at two months old, drooling and unbaptized by ethnicity. My mother tells me the border guard didn’t even ask. He just looked at her face, and waved us through. I suppose that was the first measurement.

I grew up outside. Far enough that Rwanda became a sound more than a place. A word adults said with softness and apology. My childhood was full of silences they thought I wouldn’t notice. But I did. Children always do.

I didn’t know what I was. Or rather, I didn’t know what kind of Rwandan I was supposed to be. That was the real question. The one no one asked out loud, but everyone felt sitting between their teeth.

I wasn’t raised on genocide. I was raised on photos and guesses. My father never said Tutsi. My uncle never said Hutu. They said, “We are Rwandan now.” Which is what you say when you are tired. Or when you are afraid of what your children might ask.

But then I started reading. That was the mistake.

Mahmood Mamdani first. Then I accepted David Himbara’s challenge. Alison Des Forges came second — the coldness of her precision. Then Filip Reyntjens. And others. Historians, political scientists, memory-makers. Men and women who knew the country better than I ever could. At some point, I realized I had read more about Rwanda than I had any right to.

Because I never lived in it.

And it didn’t help.

It only made the questions worse. Because the more I read, the more I started noticing. Not names. Not provinces. Noses.

I kept reading anyway. I thought maybe, if I could just find the right footnote, or the right paragraph, or the right colonial dispatch, the fog would lift. That somehow, the categories would explain themselves. But they never did. They only multiplied.

There was always another explanation. A deeper structure. A different definition of ethnicity. Some said it was colonial. Others said it was older. Some called it fluid. Others called it invented. All of them said the same thing, in the end — “It’s complicated.”

Complicated. That word again. The intellectual’s way of saying don’t trust your instincts. Which is fine for most things, but not for a country. Not for a face.

Because somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing people clearly. I’d sit across from someone in a café and I wouldn’t hear what they were saying. I’d just be thinking: is that a Tutsi face? A Hutu voice? A hybrid gait? I started looking at noses. I mean really looking. I noticed slopes, shadows, nostril width. I couldn’t help it.

I hated myself for it. And then I hated the people who made me hate myself for it.

But the worst part was this: They weren’t even doing it anymore. No one was saying the words. No one was measuring. Except me.

I had inherited a disease without the vocabulary. A phantom limb of identity. Everyone else had moved on. Unity, reconciliation, Ndi Umunyarwanda. I applauded it. I believed in it. I still do, on good days. But on bad days, I find myself watching faces on the bus like a criminal, wondering which ones would have passed the colonial caliper test.

I never tell anyone this. I’ve never written it down, until now. It’s shameful. But shame is honest.

Maybe this is what writing is for. Not to fix anything. Not to explain.But to confess the parts of yourself that aren’t supposed to exist anymore.

And that’s how I became a nose-watcher.

Not because I chose to.But because I was born too late to inherit the labels,and too early to escape their ghosts.

I became aware of faces in a way that disturbed me. Profiles. Distances. Bridges. I caught myself looking at classmates in university corridors. I would study the angles. The slope of their foreheads. I told myself I was being critical. Analytical.

But I was watching. Measuring. Guessing.

I became a nose-watcher.

Not because I wanted to. Not because I believed in any of it. But because the country I came from once did. And sometimes, when no one says the truth out loud, the body remembers it anyway.

So here I am. Thirty-one years old. Educated. Exiled. Canadian by passport and Rwandan by pain. Trying to write.

Trying to figure out what it means to come from a place that doesn’t want to remember how it once decided who lived and who died.

And for some reason, I keep coming back to noses.

---

I do not watch people any longer, Rwandans especially; I watch their noses. Because that is where the truth lies. You may trust the eyes if you wish. Fools do. Eyes lie. Eyes weep and plead. Eyes seduce. But the nose, the nose betrays nothing. It is the one honest tyrant on the face.

I was born with the kind of nose no one would fight a war for. Too long to be ignored, too short to be admired. Theologically unfit for heaven, politically unfit for tribe. A borderland nose, like everything else about me, ambiguous, trembling, suspicious. The kind of nose that makes people pause at checkpoints. That gets you detained in the ambiguity queue.

My mother said it gave me “flexibility.” My father called it “adaptable.”What they meant was: deniable.

The Belgian nun measured it when I was seven. She frowned as if I had handed her a broken rosary. She whispered in Flemish and clicked her ruler against the desk. I remember the click more than her face. That sound, hard, wooden, final. Like judgment. She didn’t look at me. She looked through me. Past me. As though my skin was noise and my nose was signal.

She wrote something in red ink on a beige card I was never allowed to see.

That was the first time I understood I had been filed.

My mother called it “standard.” My father said “we are all Rwandan now.” But even then, I knew: they were lying.They were afraid.Because they too had noses.

And in this country, we inherit not just blood and name, but profile.

There were boys in my school whose noses got them milk first, shade first, books first. There were others who were never even spoken to, their nostrils too wide, their bridges too short. One boy had a nose so flat they joked he could not enter church, his prayers would slide off. Another was called "the bridge" because his nose arched so high, they said he must have been born mid-step between heaven and Belgium.

Me? They called me "middleman."Not because I negotiated peace, but because I couldn’t belong to any side.

I watched them all, silently, obsessively. My notebooks were not filled with arithmetic or geography, but crude sketches of noses. Profiles. Shadows. I catalogued nasal structures the way monks copied scripture: with awe, with precision, with trembling.

Later in life I learned there was a name for this. Anthroposcopy, the pseudoscientific art of judging race by facial features. The white men had studied it. Published books. Held conferences. Brought calipers and rulers and doctrines. And we, the measured, we made those rulers into commandments. Our catechism was cartilage. Our sacraments were in centimeters.

I am not a religious man, but I know a theology when I see one.

The God of Rwanda has a nose. It is high. It is narrow. It is ancestral.

I remember a girl once, Nyiramaso, I think her name was. She had a tiny, upturned nose, a laugh like river water, and the audacity of happiness. One day, a teacher measured her. The next week she was reassigned to a different dormitory. A month later, she disappeared from school entirely. Years later, I saw her name printed on a memorial wall. Not for what she did. But for what her nose refused to be.

I have never stopped watching noses since.

People say identity is in the heart. Or in the blood. Fools. Identity is measured from the glabella to the tip. And I, I am the man in the corner, taking notes.

---

There was a conversation once, with strangers at a meeting. Disturbing, though I didn't realize how much until later.

It happened during one of those diaspora “culture evenings.”You know the type. Small rented hall. Folding chairs. Free samosas and fruit juice in paper cups. A flag draped awkwardly behind the podium, as if nationalism could be redecorated. Men in pressed shirts. Women in silent shoes. All of us pretending not to be watching each other’s posture.

I was there because a professor had invited me. She said it would “reconnect me.” I nodded like I believed that was possible.

Somewhere between the poem about reconciliation and the girl with the kinyarwanda folk dance, a man stood up to speak. Late 40s, maybe 50. Well-dressed. Warm voice. He thanked the organizers. Then — casually, like he was asking for the salt — he said:

“It’s good to see the children of Rwanda together. Hutu and Tutsi alike.”

No one reacted. Not at first. Then I felt the tension tighten in the room like a muscle being flexed behind the ribs. You could almost hear it — a silence with teeth.

The man smiled, as if he had said something wholesome. “It shows we’ve healed.”

Someone coughed. Someone else dropped a phone. No one clapped.

He tried again.

“In our time, we didn’t have this. This unity. Back then, we had files.”

Still silence.

I looked around and saw faces closing like books. The kind of politeness that’s indistinguishable from warning.

He sat down. He wasn’t angry. Just confused.

And I — I didn’t say a word. But I felt it. That itch. That shameful itch in the back of my mind.Was he Hutu?Was that a Hutu nose?Why did I want to know?

Later that evening, in the men’s room mirror, I stared at my own face and didn’t recognize it. I tilted my head. I tried to see myself how others might. I failed.

Someone walked in and I turned quickly, ashamed. As if I’d been caught praying to the wrong god.

That’s when I knew this wasn’t intellectual anymore.

It wasn’t about history. Or theory. Or trauma.

It was something deeper. Dumber. Older.

A reflex. A glitch in the blood.

I haven’t gone back to those meetings since.

---

That night, I opened my notebook but couldn’t write. I just sat there, pen in hand, as if the act of writing itself might betray something I hadn’t meant to reveal. Because that’s the danger, isn’t it? Once you write it down, it becomes real. It becomes yours.

I had thoughts, yes. Opinions, arguments. I could quote Des Forges and Mamdani with ease. I could explain gacaca, I could map the Arusha trials, I could dissect the categories. But every time I tried to begin, I would hear the silence from that meeting again. Not the man who spoke — but the people who didn’t.

The quiet. The correction. The refusal to go there. It made me ask myself, what exactly do I think I’m doing? Who gave me the right to write any of this?

I fled at two months old. I never lived it. I never smelled it. I have no scar to show. No loss I can name without secondhand words. Even the language I use to think about Rwanda was learned — not inherited. So what is this writing? Confession? Cowardice? Or am I just another one of those diaspora ghosts, circling a fire I never built? Still, here I am. Writing. Watching. Measuring myself in the dark. Because silence, too, begins to rot when held too long. And perhaps I’m writing not to explain, but to expose. Not to clarify, but to confess that I don’t know where the line is — between remembering and violating, between witnessing and trespassing. All I know is that I’ve started to watch. And once you begin watching, it’s very hard to stop. Especially when what you’re watching is yourself.