RAUW Member Profiles

Angelina Muganza
Member, Rwanda Association of University Women
Executive Secretary, Public Service Commission, Rwanda

By Edward Guthmann

Angelina Muganza knows what it means to suffer agonizing hardships and survive. “I grew up a refugee girl, highly deprived,” she says. “Without my father, with no wealth at all, except my hardworking mother.”

In 1962, her businessman father was killed in one of Rwanda’s earliest genocides. “We don’t know where he was killed. We don’t know where he was buried.”

From the age of five, Angelina lived in Uganda where Rwandese exiles were treated as unwelcome inferiors. During the 1994 genocide, 400 members of her extended family were murdered. “In my mother’s family, we counted her uncles, cousins, their wives and children. Less than 20 survived.”

Despite all of that, Angelina, 50, prevailed and became one of the most successful Rwandese women leaders. In March 2008, she became Executive Secretary of the Public Service Commission, an organization established by the Rwandan Constitution of 2003 to guarantee that civil servants are recruited fairly, transparently and without bias. Prior to that, she was Minister for State for the Public Service, following some years as Minister for Gender and Women in Development appointed by President Paul Kagame.

None of that could have happened, she says, were it not for the inspiration she received from her mother’s persistence. “I had a living example that even with misery you can overcome and make a decent life.”

Angelina lives today in Kigali with her husband, Canisius Muganza. They have three sons -- 21, 19 and 14 -- and a daughter, 17. The oldest son studies computer science at Gambling State University in Louisiana, and their daughter is attending her senior year of high school also in the United States, in Texas.

For our interview, Angelina arrived in the late afternoon, directly from her work place. Dressed conservatively in a blue suit, she has the look of someone so dedicated to her work that she sometimes overlooks details -- such as the eyeglass frames that are sitting crooked across the bridge of her nose. She is a friendly, earnest, unpretentious person – a delight.  

After her father’s murder, she remembers, “My mother was run out of the country as a refugee without education, without property, without even knowledge of the local language where we went (a rural sector of Uganda). But she learned the local language, and she started a business – buying and selling foodstuffs -- because she had seen my father doing business. And she managed to raise us up, four of us.”

There was a second angel in Angelina’s life. “She was a British missionary who was working as a teacher, Doreen Drake. She was in the nearest town and one of her projects was helping refugee children to be educated. And she would link us with people in Europe and America who wanted to give some money to educate a poor girl or poor boy.

“So I had my own benefactor. And when I went to high school, Doreen Drake was a teacher in the same school. She was tough and we feared her. We didn’t want to disappoint her. So, in a way, I think she modeled me and taught me how to be very hard-working. She used to say things like, ‘Don’t keep for tomorrow what you can do today.’ ”

Later, in her work with Gender and Women in Development, Angelina met impoverished girls and young women whose deprivations were identical to the ones she had endured. Because of her mother’s diligence, and because of the good works of Doreen Drake, she says, “I believed it was feasible, that I could make a difference in the lives of women, given my background.”

Although she lived in Uganda from 1963 to 1987, and went to Makerere University in Kampala, Angelina always identified as Rwandese and longed to return home. During the genocide, “We were following everything that was happening and we knew that one of the principles of the RPF (Rwandan Political Front) was to repatriate the refugees. That’s why they were fighting.”

Angelina and her family were living in Nairobi. On 1 January 1995, still not knowing how many relatives they would find when they returned to Rwanda, they got in their car and drove two days to Kigali. Her youngest son was 3 months old at the time. 

Returning to their homeland was “very sad,” she says, “because we didn’t know what we were coming to see. We had seen things on CNN, pictures of the genocide. I remember our little boys, who were 5 and 6 then, they even believed that they were going to see dead bodies on the roadside. They were scared...and we were also anxious because we didn’t know who of our relatives we would find alive.”

The initial months were painful, when hundreds of thousands of Tutsi exiles came home to help to rebuild their country. Today, Angelina sees opportunities for young women that didn’t exist in her youth.

“I think the women of my daughter’s generation are very lucky. There are many changes that are happening in our country, to give women their rights, but also to appreciate their contribution and their potential.  So with the trend of women’s participation in human rights -- including, of course, women’s rights -- I hope that she will participate fully.”

“I always tell young women that they are lucky - they don’t have to explain that they are capable, you know. Because of the laws and policies and the programs we now have in this country, they will find the ground much better -- more leveled -- than I did when I was growing up.”