This interview introduces Michel Kichka and Joëlle Epée Mandengue, the two artists working on the survivor-centered graphic novels within the Rwanda Research Cluster of the SCVN project. In April 2025, they met online for a conversation facilitated by Dr. Anna Ball, an Advanced Research Fellow supporting the Rwanda team based at the University of Aberdeen. Together, they discussed their experiences of working on the project so far; how they are grappling with the weight of history and of their responsibility to the survivors’ experiences they are representing; as well as the personal and professional journeys that have guided them to this work.
Joëlle Epée Mandengue is a Cameroonian comic book artist based in Guinea Conakry. Working under the penname of ‘Elyon’s’, she is the author of the successful series, The Diary of Ebene Duta, and a number of comic works describing, with humour and a pinch of tragedy, slices of the lives of black characters who are living in other territories and experiencing different cultures. She is also the creator and director of the Bilili BD comic festival in Congo Brazzaville, which has branched out to other countries across the African continent, including Rwanda. Joëlle is working with an anonymous survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, who was a mother to several young children at the time of the genocide. In its wake, she became the mother of several more orphaned nephews and nieces, who are also represented in the graphic novel.
Michel Kichka is an Israeli graphic novelist of Belgian origin based in Jerusalem, where he studied graphic design and taught at the Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts until his retirement in 2025. Alongside a longstanding international career as political cartoonist and member of Cartooning for Peace, he is the author of several graphic novels, including Second Generation: The Things I Didn’t Tell My Father, about his experience as the son of a Holocaust survivor. Michel is working with genocide survivor Jerome Irankunda, who was just six years old when the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi overwhelmed Rwanda. Michel’s work is also supported by the contributions of Jerome’s wife, Nina Uwera.
Anna: The project that you are working on is concerned with representing the stories of survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi through the graphic novel form. But I would like to begin by understanding a little more about your own personal histories, and what brought you to find your voice in graphic novels.
Michel: I was born in Belgium 70 years ago to a family of Holocaust survivors. My father lost all his family and was in different camps for three years and survived. And my mother’s family were refugees in Switzerland, but originally they had all come from Poland. My grandparents had emigrated from Poland after the First World War because for the Jewish population the situation there was worse than anywhere else in Europe.
I was born with a talent for drawing. My father wanted to be an artist, and he was very talented, but he was arrested when he was 16 and liberated when he was 19 from the camps in Buchenwald, so he could not accomplish his dream to be an artist. But I could, because I was a baby boomer born after the Second World War. And I was born in Belgium: a kingdom of comics. Here, I grew up on the classic Franco-Belgian comics: Tintin; The Smurfs… These were my heroes when I was a kid. And this is what I wanted to do, and I knew it from the age of six.
In 1986, I first read Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, Maus. He won the Pulitzer Prize for this work, and it was the first time this had been awarded to a comic. The work was also unique in its way of addressing adult readers, not kids. It was not funny, and there were no heroes. That was real life. I remember when I first read Maus the positive shock that I had. I said to myself – well, if he did it, it means that it’s possible to tell people about your life in comics.
Michel Kichka (Photo credit: Elie Max Kichka).
Joëlle: I was also passionate about comics from a very tender age. I was born in Cameroon, and I grew up there. My parents used to tell me that I was already so caught up with animated features when I was something like four or six months old. You know, for people of African descent, it can be very painful to comb the hair. So, I would sit and watch animations while I had my hair braided, and I would be completely numb to what was going on around me. I knew from a very, very young age that I wanted to tell stories, and to convey messages through drawings. So, I made my first comic book at the age of 7 and even learned how to sew the book together when I was 9. And from then on, I pursued that dream.
I grew up as the first born in my family and as the only girl, it was really difficult for my parents to admit that this could be my full-time job. Both of them were like, “why can’t you find, you know, a decent job?” They both worked in banking and finance. So, I took my degree in English and French, and after that, started working in a French cultural centre. I had to show my family that I could earn money and be independent. But also, I could not miss out on my dream. And so, when I reached the age of 25, a bell really rang in my head, and I realized it’d been a quarter of a century in which I’d done things that were not my core passion in life. I told my parents that I wanted to spend the rest of my life messing it up on my own terms and conditions.
So that’s when I went to study Fine and Graphic Arts in Belgium. And after that, I started to get some jobs, and my parents saw that I could be paid $300 per page as a comic artist. I was invited for a residency in the Caribbean. And so, at that point, my parents told me that I had their blessing because I’d proven to them that there was not just one way of succeeding. And this was really a milestone in my quest as an artist. It has helped me a lot to know that I can dream big and I have my family behind me.
Joëlle Epée Mandengue – Elyon’s (Photo credit: Joëlle Epée Mandengue – Elyon’s)
Michel: I also had a moment when I realized that I needed to take my life in my hands. When I was 19, I decided to emigrate, and I moved from Belgium to Israel. I understood at this age that being born talented is not enough. I needed to study and develop my skills to improve what I had learned by copying comics as a child. So, I was admitted to the Art School of Jerusalem. And I’ve been teaching illustration and comics for 40 years in the same academy in which I studied.
Anna: I’m interested to learn more about your decision to get involved in this project. Neither of you are from Rwanda, yet you have both made a significant commitment to grapple with its history through the stories of survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. How do you relate to the content and context of these stories?
Michel: I was invited to Rwanda four years ago by the Israeli Embassy for the commemoration of World Holocaust Day on 27th January.
The Rwandans I met were asking me a lot of questions about the Holocaust because they had a very deep need for their genocide against the Tutsi to be known, to be written about, to have creation around it. And I felt that my personal experience offered something.
So, when this project was proposed to me, it was like a call. I knew very little about Rwandan history, but I can see the connections. And now that Tutsi and Hutu are living together, they are both part of their reconciliation program. There is much to learn at this moment. So, the fact that this project is now on the table is something very special.
Joëlle: My own relationship to this project has obviously been very different from Michel’s. But I have other issues that connect me to it – like the fact that Cameroon has had the same president since I was born. As Cameroonians, we have a history of colonial violence and postcolonial pressure that are still denied. We have archives that we still don’t have access to.
There is a huge part of our hurtful memories that we don’t have access to. I’ve been growing up as a Cameroonian by birth, but my culture is not at peace with its past. So, working on a project like this, where a country is looking at the horror of its past, facing it, trying to work from it, trying to build from it, is really something that resonates at a personal level for me too.
But I feel my link to Rwanda in another way, too. When I was living in Congo, we used to fly with RwandAir to Cameroon, Douala, where I am originally from and where my parents were living. And when I was travelling on these planes, I was flabbergasted, overwhelmed by the quality of the service. I’m really uncomfortable in planes, but these were wonderful. And the Head of Staff began to notice me because I was among the regular clients on that line. So we’d get chatting. And at one point I summoned up the courage to ask one of the Stewards – what happened after 1994? You guys seem like you are thriving. I read about how you’re aiming to be the Singapore of Africa. So our discussions started. And it was that Air Steward who gave me so many stories about what Rwanda is as a society – how complex it is. He explained the difficulties of, you know, having a crush on a girl, then discovering that girl is from the family that murdered your neighbour. How will you reconcile that? I was fascinated. So, when Fransiska wrote to me and asked me to consider embarking on this journey, I didn’t even know how to express it in words. Having the right to work on this project really meant a lot to me.
But I am also aware I’m not from Rwanda. There are so many things I won’t be able to understand. We are all Africans, but we have varied histories. I talked with Erin and Fransiska about this – wondering if I am legitimate enough to work on this subject. But what has really given me peace and focus is the fact that I also have my own unique lens that I bring to the project, as a foreigner – someone who has not had to live that history for 30 years. And it is the following thing that was really emphasized about the project by Fransiska and Erin.
This project is about building dialogue across cultures, and how we search for understanding by connecting with others, as well as through our own experiences.
Anna: What has it been like working with the survivors on this project? What have been the most challenging and enriching aspects of this collaborative process?
Joëlle: The person I am working with was already an adult at the time of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. And when I first started to encounter her stories, it was really brutal. Watching documentaries, reading materials on the subject, going to a memorial is something; but having this encounter with her was something else.
During our interviews, we were working with her son, who was also the translator, creating a linguistic triangle in our conversation. That time of translation was very difficult to handle for me because my mind had to process the information that it just got. Then you are awaiting the next translation, and you have this silence where you’re facing the survivor. So, you can have this physical connection in the presence of the survivor, but then there are spaces of disconnection in which you are left to process the deep, horrible information. So, one day during the interview, I asked for permission to digest the information, and I felt really guilty for this. I felt – this is her life; her memory; she went through it. But in this case, it’s the artist who needs a break.
Yet at the same time, I felt really privileged to have this access to things that are so traumatic, but that still need to be told for history not to repeat itself.
Michel: I identify with lots of things that you have just said, Joëlle. You know, Jerome, when you meet him, you can’t understand what he has passed through. He’s so optimistic and full of life and action and positive thinking. And this is the lesson that I would like the reader to learn: how he has rebuilt himself.
A challenging aspect of working on Jerome’s story is that there are a lot of things in his history that have no visual references. They were all lost. You know, when I visited the memorial in Kigali, there’s a room where photographs are hung, like clothes. Jerome told me he goes there very often to look at the photos because people who find documents bring them to the memorial, and he wonders if one day he will find a photo of a man and woman who could be his own parents. So, during our interview, I asked a lot of questions about what the house was like, the village where he lived, how he dressed at school because he had no photos to show me.
Draft artwork by Michel Kichka, responding to the memorial in Kigali that he visited during his trip to Rwanda, and conversations he had with local Rwandans. Photo credit: Michel Kichka.
Anna: So far, you have both visited Rwanda and interviewed the survivors whose stories you are drawing. In these early stages of contemplating and developing the graphic novels, what ideas, images, and decisions are emerging for you?
Joëlle: So, in my head at the moment, there is this idea of the seed. The survivor with whom I am working has strong faith in God. I too am a Christian – and that gave me the idea of the seed in the Christian faith. We learn that Christ died, and he was buried and resurrected, and brought with him a new way of living. And this lady, she also created life, she had many children. So, there’s this image of the seed getting into the soil and producing a family tree. And that’s why, when we had our interviews, I sketched a tree. She really went through death and came back to life.
And it is also an image of what you produce from your suffering – because you could decide just to feel vengeful. You could fall into a depression. But you can also find a way for something to come of your suffering – to move from the seed to the tree. That is something that has really formed part of my translation of the survivor’s story. It’s also important from a Rwandan cultural point of view, as it highlights the role of the umuko tree. I am also exploring the way I can present graphic imagery, through the umuko flower. The heart shaped leaves, thorns, reddish flower, make the umuko tree a very special element that can be used all through the story.
Draft sketch by Joëlle Epée Mandengue – Elyon’s, showing the motif of the umuko flower that bears symbolic significance in her graphic novel. Photo credit: Joëlle Epée Mandengue – Elyon’s.
Michel: For me, personal history is the best way to access history. So, I find in Jerome’s narrative the possibility to tell people about a big history through his personal history, to better understand people who pass through deep traumas and to better understand humanity and probably themselves in the process. I don’t want to offer simply a lesson in history; I want to tell a personal life experience of someone real who exists.
Anna: It’s clear that both of you feel a tremendous sense of responsibility towards the people whose stories you are collaboratively creating, and to the graphic novels that are emerging because of this collaborative process. What do you hope your work will achieve?
Joëlle: I hope to bring my reader to see the many layers of history and experience there are within the story of my survivor. This is something I always work to create. On the surface, my drawings are very cute and nice, with lots of colours. When people come to my drawings, they do so thinking the work is light – but the more they really get into it, the more they realise this is just a way to get you closer to many more hidden layers. The idea is really to work through contrast. They may think they see the story in the drawings immediately, but they have deeper layers of messaging. There is much more beneath the surface.
Michel: It strikes me that there are many things we can learn from what has come after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. You know, Jerome was so young, he was six, when he found himself an orphan. He was brought up as a son by his uncle and aunt. And what is also very interesting is that when he went back to school, “artificial families” of people were created to support one another. It was part of the experience in the classroom. This reconciliation program is unique in the story of the world, and so this will be part of the story that I tell. It will emphasize the process of rebuilding resilience that has taken place in Rwanda.
Recently I saw the short video that Marc [Ellison] shot when we were in Belgium and in Rwanda [‘Why We Dance’]. And at the end of that film, he showed Jerome and his wife Nina dancing, and I watched it with a huge smile.
This is what I would like the reader to experience. I want to bring Jerome to life; I want to show that those who committed the genocide failed in ways that matter. This is the lesson I would like people to remember.
Many thanks, Joëlle and Michel, for so generously sharing your time and experience with us. It will be wonderful to see how these thoughts emerge in your graphic novels.
To learn more about Joëlle and Michel’s ongoing collaborations with survivors in the Rwanda Research Cluster, check out their page here.
