EVEN in the best of times, Rwanda has never been a congenial place for the emancipated woman. For decades, the state propagated an austere ideology of hard work and peasant virtue that excluded women from the corridors of power and work.
The most Catholic country in Africa encouraged women not to look beyond the role of motherhood and organised sinister "reeducation" programmes to get prostitutes and other undesirables off the streets.
The genocide changed all this or should have. Most of its 800,000 victims were men: suddenly the population was 70 per cent female. Women were left with the children, the economic burden and the trauma.
Farming wives had always helped out in the fields, but now they were required to do all the heavy work, build or re-build their houses and look after their own children and those of dead brothers and sisters.
However, the problem is that Rwandan law treats women as second-class citizens.
As they are not entitled to inherit land, between 70 to 80 per cent of households headed by widows will have nothing to pass on to their children, the British aid agency, Action Aid International says.
Its co-ordinator, Mr Robert Dodd, yesterday told a conference in Nairobi that this situation was "a time-bomb waiting to explode". He urged the international community to focus on the question of land reform in the country.
In the cities, the shortage of male labour has created new opportunities for women. The Tutsi dominated regime which swept to power in 1994 brought with it many well-educated women who had been raised in Uganda, Zaire or the West and were not prepared to accept the submissive roles formerly allotted to their sex.
As a result, women have started to make their mark in business and politics. A network of more than 200 women's associations has sprung up in both town and country.
Yet the survivors are also the maimed. The trauma of the genocide lives on. Nearly everyone lost family members; for many, the experience was even worse. Hutu militia groups and the Rwandan military regularly used rape and other forms of sexual violence as a weapon in the genocide. The crimes against women - rape, gang rape, sexual slavery, and sexual mutilation - usually followed the torture and killing of husbands and other relatives and the burning of homes.
"The genocide in Rwanda left a population that is 70 per cent female, and the stories told by survivors defy comprehension," says Ms Dorothy Thomas, director of the Human Rights Watch women's rights project.
Human Rights Watch has called on the government to eliminate discrimination against women. It also wants the International Tribunal on Rwanda to investigate sexual crimes, an area for which no indictments have been issued as yet.
To deal with the trauma largely borne by women, counselling projects have been established in a number of centres. Trocaire is training a group of 15 women from Kigali and the southern town of Gikongoro who, it is hoped, will provide counselling services in their own localities.
The women involved come from both Hutu and Tutsi backgrounds and have to struggle against deep-seated mutual animosities which sometimes come to the surface.
The group told me the genocide traumatised all women, affecting their ability to work and to help themselves. When I asked did time not heal all wounds, one person replied: "The wounds in Rwanda are different. The time for healing will be longer."
