IN THE TIME BEFORE THE GENOCIDE it had been fashionable for the elite to buy country estates near a region named Kabuga just outside the capital. The area is attractive, with low hills and unusually large plantations full of grazing livestock. Almost everyone in Rwanda, no matter how long they have lived in a city, keeps close connections with the soil, and even a lifelong office worker probably has a few goats to call his own in a village somewhere outside the capital. The biggest gentlemen-farmer flocks, however, were at Kabuga. It was the best weekend address in the nation.
We were hustled there by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which had turned it into a kind of refugee holding area. But it was no camp in the conventional sense. It was a looting zone.
Soldiers from the rebel army had stolen food from all the shops. Potatoes had been dug out of the fields. Goats had been captured and slaughtered. This made me furious. It was the same kind of impunity we had seen in 1959 during the Hutu Revolution, only this time it was yesterday’s victims who were helping themselves to the spoils. War is hell, and ugly things happen in its midst-I know this. But they always create permanent resentments that have a way of erupting later in history. The casual disrespect for other people and their property was what helped create the genocide we had just lived through. I was afraid I was watching the conception of another. It made me feel as though Rwandans had learned nothing at all.
It therefore does not make me proud to tell you this: I, too, was among those who had to forage for food. I can only say that it was a choice between that or going hungry. My family and I also slept in the house of an unknown family who had fled the advancing rebel army. I can only hope these strangers would forgive us today. I never knew who they were, but it made me terribly uncomfortable to be using their property.
There was a surprise in the camp. We spotted the children of my wife’s brother-the man who I had been dining with on the terrace of the Diplomates on the night Habyarimana’s plane had been shot down. Anaise was two and a half and Izere was barely a year old. They were being taken care of by our housemaid, who had managed to struggle into the camp. Both of the children were covered in dirt and appeared to be starving and barely alive. They had been living for months on ground-up chicken feed. Where were their parents? Tatiana was frantic to know. But the maid could only hold up her hands. The parents had both disappeared shortly after the genocide broke out. I remember shaking hands with my brother-in-law and his wife the night of the president’s assassination, a time that seemed to be as far away as my own childhood. He was bidding me good-bye and urged me to be safe before I went into my house that night. I now wondered if I had shaken his hand for the last time.
There were stories like that all over the camp: unexpected reunions and revelations of awful news from the past two and a half months. Nights were the hardest for us. Weeping filled the air. I found it hard to find even the mindless release of sleep. Wives came to understand that they would never see their missing husbands again. Parents had to force themselves to stop imagining how their irreplaceable children had died at the hands of strangers. And that emptiness in their lives would go on and on. It took a tremendous force of will to keep your own heart together in this unending grief.
The rebel soldiers were hardly welcoming. They treated us like prisoners of war. Some of the stronger men among us were offered the chance to take a few days of military training to fight against the Rwandan Army. The offer was a little tempting, but I refused. “I always fight with words, ” I told them. “Not with guns.” Many of the refugees who chose to join up never came back; they were killed in combat, or killed by their supposed protectors in the rebel army. They were invited for meetings and that was their last night on earth.
What I really wanted was to get the hell out of Rwanda. I had had enough. We were away from the militias but still in danger to be killed anytime by the rebels. We were also filthy and exhausted and needing a break. I told my new hosts that I and my family wanted either to be driven to the Ugandan border or flown to Belgium. What I got in reply was a wishy-washy response, that classic Rwandan no of which I was thoroughly sick: “We will look into it for you, Mr. Manager.” Nothing happened, of course. Day followed day. All we could do was eat more purloined bananas and wait for the war to be over, or to be killed ourselves.
Meanwhile, one of the largest mass migrations of people in African history was under way.
The government of France had been in continual and friendly contact with its allies at the top of the Hutu government and was growing increasingly alarmed at the likelihood of their neocolony falling to English-speaking rebels. In mid-June, just as my hotel was being evacuated, the French announced plans to send a peacekeeping mission to the western part of Rwanda for “humanitarian” reasons. This gave the génocidaires the chance to look like victims instead of aggressors, and they started to pack up and leave for the protected area that became known as “the Turquoise Zone.”
RTLM radio then performed its final disservice to the nation by scaring the living daylights out of the people remaining in Rwanda, a considerable number of whom had just spent two months murdering their neighbors and chasing the less compliant ones through swamps. The radio told them that the RPF would kill any Hutus they found in their path and encouraged all its listeners to pack up their belongings and head either to Tanzania or the western part of the country and the borders of the Democratic Republic of Congo (what used to be called Zaire), where the French soldiers awaited. Nearly 1.7 million people heeded the call. Entire hills and cities mobilized into caravans: men carrying sacks of bananas, some with bloody machetes in their belt loops; women with baskets of grain on their heads; children hugging photo albums to their chests. They wound their way past corpses piled at the side of the road and the smoldering cooking fires in front of looted houses. I am sorry to say that the dire predictions of the radio were not rooted in fantasy, as the rebels did conduct crimes against humanity in revenge for the genocide and to make people fear them. In any case, what was left of Rwanda emptied out within days.
The U. N. Security Council, so ineffective in the face of the genocide, lent its sponsorship to the camps the French set up to protect the “refugees.” The main place of comfort to the killers was at a town called Goma, just over the border into the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is in a bleak area at the foot of a chain of volcanoes and the town is set in a plain of hardened black lava. Into this hellish landscape, the French airlifted twenty-five hundred well-equipped paratroopers, Foreign Legionnaires, helicopters, fighter jets, tents, water supplies, food, jeeps-everything, in short, that the pathetic UN force could have used when the murders were at their height in April. Now all of these assets were being used to feed and shelter some of the very people who carried out the slaughter.
Many of the French troops sent to support the effort were apparently there in the belief that they would eventually be used to attack the rebel army, which was closing in on Kigali. Meanwhile, the Interahamwe began organizing the refugees into squadrons in the camps, preparing them for an imminent return to Rwanda to keep filling the graves. Radio RTLM set up relay transmitters in the camp so their broadcasts could continue to be heard among the faithful. It was difficult to tell the innocent from the guilty, but comfort was provided to everyone.
In a surprise for all of us the United States finally was persuaded to act. When cholera and other diseases broke out the Clinton administration announced it would seek $320 million in aid for the camps at Goma and the killers and announced a public health initiative to clean up the water-bloated corpses that had floated over into Uganda. This US aid package totaled more than sixteen times what it would have taken to electronically jam the hate radio, which would have stopped many of those people from becoming corpses.
On July 4, with much of the civilian population in flight, the RPF captured the capital of Kigali after a brief battle. They had conquered a ruined city and caused further destruction. Houses were knocked over. Churches were covered in blood. Hospitals were empty shells, looted of supplies. Land mines and live mortar rounds were lying everywhere. Wrecked vehicles blocked the roads. And the corpses were stuffed everywhere: inside closets, underneath desks, and down water wells, and shoved casually to the edge of the sidewalks. The stench of decaying flesh choked the air. Barely thirty thousand people remained, a tenth of Kigali ’s population before the genocide began.
Rwanda ’s other major cities toppled swiftly from there and the country was all but conquered. On July 14 the plug was pulled on RTLM for good. Less than a week later the rebel army swore in a new government. It marked the official end of the genocide, but not the end of the killings. The aftermath would be long and dirty.
I was informed that my request to travel to Belgium had been approved on one condition: that I travel alone, leaving my wife and children behind. “Forget it, ” I told them. “I have changed my mind. I am staying now.”
The rebel army took us back to the Mille Collines, which was in wretched shape. After I had left some people had taken it upon themselves to start cooking fires on the lobby tiles and ash was everywhere. The hallway carpets were covered in a disgusting glaze of grease and human waste. Doors were broken from their hinges. The RPF had looted the remaining supply of drinks and liquor that I had used to keep so many people alive. The kitchen was a disaster. Almost everything of value had been stolen or damaged beyond repair.
I cleared the squatters out, rallied what staff I could find, and got to work. We obtained some cleaning solution and carpentry equipment to make the place semipresentable again. My colleague Bik Cornelis had arrived back in the country from the Netherlands and was working side by side with me. The hotel had to start functioning again. Rwanda was about to be besieged with journalists, humanitarian workers, peacekeeping soldiers, and more than 150 nongovernmental organizations. All those people who had abandoned us during the slaughter were coming back and they needed a place to stay. The irony was too bitter to think of for long. There were many things it didn’t pay to think of for very long. And truthfully, it felt good just to have this housekeeping task in front of me, and I lost myself in a million details. I am a hotel manager and this was where I belonged.
We reopened on July 15, having been closed a little less than a month.
My family settled in the manager’s house at the Hotel Diplomates, where some of our friends had hidden under the noses of the génocidaires. It was where we felt the safest. We did not dare to go back to our family house in Kabeza, and I had no particular desire to see those neighbors of mine who had transformed themselves into lunatics during those first days in April.
My wife and I had been continually worried about our families in the south and I was able to take a day off from the hotel to go check on them. My friend John Bosco hot-wired an abandoned car, as was the custom in those days immediately after the genocide. When the road opened up into the lush hills that I loved, we found ourselves in a twilight country we did not recognize. The silence was near complete. Everybody was either dead or exiled. The only thing I heard was dogs barking and snarling as they fought each other to feast on human remains. Crowds of people normally line the sides of the roads in Rwanda: boys driving herds of goats; women in colorful shifts balancing baskets on their heads; elderly men carrying sticks and wearing donated T-shirts; merchants hawking batteries and leaves of tobacco on blankets spread on the ground. They were nowhere to be seen. The life of the country had been sucked away. It was like a plague from the Dark Ages had descended.
“I don’t know this place, ” said my wife. “I’m scared.”
I began to dislike the eucalyptus trees on the side of the highway. They were reminding me of the killers I’d seen from the hotel roof. I found myself scanning the brush on the side of the road for the flash of a machete or a grinning killer. We saw so many dead bodies scattered on the side of the road that we began not to see them anymore. I wanted to make conversation with my wife just to distract myself, but there was nothing to talk about that didn’t lead to a bad place, and so I fell into a reverie. I wondered how many of those dead shells I might have known in the time before, perhaps people who had come into the Mille Collines for drinks, or relatives of friends that I’d met. Perhaps I’d only passed them in the markets without looking. Whoever they were, each one was irreplaceable, as irreplaceable to the people they loved as I was to my wife, or she was to me, or us to our children. Their uniqueness was gone forever, their stories, their experiences, their loves-erased with a few swings of a cheap machete.
Ah, Rwanda. Why?
My family and I could easily have been a part of that caravan of the dead. All it would have taken was a slip of my luck, the wrong word to a general, a whim of a militia chief. Even after everything I had seen in the previous three months I felt as though I had been terribly naive. I hadn’t really grasped the true scale of the disaster, how deep it had gone, and how that membrane of protection around our hotel had been so fragile. That it had held up for seventy-six days was a miracle. With the rest of the country looking like a giant cemetery there was nothing that should have stopped those killers from wiping us out as well. We would have been like a handful of sand on a mile-long beach.
It did not ease my feeling of general anxiety at all that we were the only car on the road. There were a number of roadblocks, of course. They were manned not by the Interahamwe this time, but by the RPF. The soldiers looked at us curiously. “What are you doing out here?” they wanted to know. “Don’t you know how dangerous it is out here?” They were very suspicious of us. But they let us pass.
We arrived in my hometown after a few hours. It was as deserted as the roads had been. This was where my friend Aloise had wanted us to take refuge-the place where the mwami had taken his cows for safety during wars of past centuries. But that old myth had been broken in the past few weeks. The genocide had come here, too. More than 150 people connected to the Seventh-day Adventist Church had had the same idea as Aloise. These rural pastors and their families had come here thinking they would be protected at the college at Gitwe where I had attended school. They had all been slaughtered.
It occurred to me that if I had stayed with my earlier ambition to be a pastor, I might very well have been among them, and then killed in the same classroom where I had learned to make letters.
Things were no better in the neighboring town where my family had lived. In the commune house several dozen Tutsis had gathered under the protection of the local mayor, who had promised to shield them from the mobs of ordinary people who had taken up machetes against their neighbors. On April 18 an official had been called to a political meeting in the nearby city of Gitarama, and when he came back there was trouble. “I am no longer the person you knew, ” he allegedly said, and then put a handgun to the head of a friend of his, a man he had gone to school with and had known for more than twenty years. He shot his friend and then ordered an attack on the commune house. Those refugees who weren’t killed immediately darted into the swamps and the hills, where they spent the next two months trying to hide from the bands of bar keepers, schoolteachers, and housewives who had been told: “Do your work.”
I went to the home of my elder brother Munyakayanza and found him sitting quietly in the front room with his wife. Seeing him alive made me want to cry with gratitude. We embraced, but I could feel that his muscles were tense. His eyes darted from my eyes to the places behind my shoulder. The area around his house was usually full of life, neighbors passing back and forth, children rolling bicycle rims with sticks, and teenagers playing tussling games, but now there was nobody. Not even any cooking fires were burning. It was totally quiet.
“Our neighbors have been killed by the militia, ” he told me. He and his wife survived because they were Hutus. Now that the rebel army had driven out the militia it was not safe anymore to be of this class. In fact, it could be a death sentence. Some rogue members of the RPF had begun to conduct reprisal killings in several parts of Rwanda. Around me I could see burned-out houses where people had been roasted alive within their own walls.
“Listen, brother, ”Munyakayanza told me. “Please leave this place. The houses, they have eyes. The trees have ears.”
I decoded his message. My presence here would be noticed and was a danger to both his family and mine. I quickly hugged him again and left. My wife started to cry, and I tried my best to comfort her, but it was impossible. We now headed toward my wife’s hometown, the old Tutsi capital of Nyanza. Tatiana was so frightened she could barely speak, but we had to see, we had to go there, even though we already knew in our hearts what we would find.
Most of her family had been slain by their neighbors. Several of them had been buried in a shallow pit used for the maturing of bananas. Tatiana’s mother had been one of the sweetest, kindest women I’d ever met. She had always shared food with her neighbors in times of trouble and was always available to help look after children in their parents’ absence. She had been murdered along with her daughter-in-law and six grandchildren. The walls of her house had been knocked down. I could see some of its distinctive tiles already plastered into the walls of nearby houses. The looting had been quick and efficient.
I felt bright hatred surging up in my throat for the bastards that had done this. I am not a violent man, but if I had had a gun in that moment, and if somebody had pointed me to a convincing scapegoat, I would have murdered him without hesitation. I had saved more than a thousand people in the capital, but I could not save my own family. What a stupid and useless man I was!
I tasted, in that moment, the poison and self-hatred in my country’s bloodstream, that irresistible fury against a ghost, the quenchless desire to make someone pay for an unrightable wrong. My father would have said that I had drunk from the water that was upstream from the lamb.
My wife and I crouched there in the remains of her mother’s house, holding on to each other, and for the first time in many years, I wept.
Nothing could ever be the same for us again.
My family and I stayed in the manager’s cottage at the Diplomates while Rwanda went about the slow process of trying to rebuild itself. Work is an excellent place to lose yourself, and I proceeded to do just that. My bosses at Sabena had been satisfied with my performance during the genocide, and I was allowed to keep my job as the general manager of the Hotel Diplomates. Business was booming, of course. Rwanda ’s expatriate class had swelled once again now that the terror was over.
There was a change in my employment in February 1995. The Sabena Corporation was planning to merge with Swissair, but a condition of the deal was that Sabena would renovate all of its existing hotels. They were then forced to break their management contract with the new government of Rwanda, which was the legal owner of the Diplomates. This put me in a difficult spot. I thought about asking for another job in the corporation, but I enjoyed too much the demands of day-to-day management-the attending of the thousand little details that make a hotel the welcoming place that it is. This was my deepest image of myself. I was born to be a site manager, not a suit in a conference room. And so Sabena and I parted on friendly terms.
But I found a way to stay on as the manager of the Diplomates. With the Belgian corporation now gone the government needed someone experienced to run the hotel and I brought them a proposal that allowed me to stay on as manager while still living on the property. My wife opened a pharmacy downtown and we managed to make a decent living together while Rwanda tried to reinvent itself as a new nation.
The government got rid of those wretched ID books and made it taboo for anyone to be officially labeled as a Hutu or a Tutsi-a change that I and millions of others applauded. Informal “orphanages” spontaneously opened up all over the country, often run by teenagers; few adults were left to take charge. An entire generation of young people was told never to mention their ethnicity to anyone because it could mark them for death in the changing currents of history. Rwandan exiles from all over the world, some of whom hadn’t seen their country for thirty years, flooded back inside. There were more than three-quarters of a million of them, which meant there were roughly three new settlers for every four people who had been killed in the genocide, a ghoulish impersonal replacement. The exiles were mostly from Uganda, Burundi and the Congo, but they came from the United States and Canada and Belgium and Switzerland as well. Prisons, meanwhile, were jammed full of people suspected of having killed their neighbors.
The economy, like the infrastructure, was in a shambles. An entire year’s coffee crop had been lost. What little industry there was had been destroyed. But international aid helped get the power back on, and Rwandans have always been creative when it comes to making money. There was a brief period of Wild West capitalism, in which it became possible to grow very rich transporting foodstuffs and goods from Uganda. Anybody with a working truck could make fantastic profits hauling bananas and beans.
My own life, meanwhile, became complicated and a little frightening. It was with profoundly mixed feelings that I returned to the streets where I had seen the bodies of my friends and neighbors stacked up like garbage. Their bloodstains had washed away in the autumn rains, but I always took note of the spots where I had seen them lying. The Mille Collines no longer smelled like a refugee camp, but it was hard to walk its halls without feeling that palpable sense of impending murder. The role I had played in saving those people had not been forgotten, and it was not appreciated in many quarters. I had seen too much and knew too many names. There were many people in the new government who had been complicit in the genocide and who feared any surviving witnesses from that time. They were political survivors, hard men, dangerous when threatened. Every time I saw a stranger scowl in my direction I tried to memorize his face in case I had to find him later if he harmed my family.
Others had it in for me for economic reasons. The hotel management contract I had received was seen as a cash cow by some of the thugs close to the new government. One very bizarre incident at the hotel convinced me I might be better off living someplace else. A friend of mine came by the hotel one evening with an Army sergeant. The sergeant was highly agitated and it became clear that my friend was not there by choice. I tried to calm things down and offered them a beer, but the sergeant would not sit still for long. He took out his pistol and told me: “We know you have stolen computers in your house!”
“That is foolish, ” I told him.
“Then you will not have any problem showing me your house?”
“All right, ” I said. “This is foolishness, but if you insist, come look.”
The three of us walked into the next room. Our housemaid was inside, and when she saw the Army sergeant’s pistol, she screamed.
“He is going to kill you!” she said, and without thinking, I dashed toward the sergeant and shoved him hard into the wall. He dropped his gun. I supposed I could have grabbed it off the floor and pointed it at him, but my instinct told me otherwise. I raced out into the parking lot and toward the Army post next door-the place, as it happened, where the ten Belgian soldiers had been killed by torture in the opening hours of the genocide. There is hardly a patch of ground in Rwanda, of course, where somebody was not hacked to death in 1994. I got the attention of some of the soldiers on guard and told them I had been threatened by the sergeant. They took him away and I learned that he was attached to the Department of Military Intelligence, our nation’s version of the CIA.
The next day, an influential Army major named Rwabalinda came in to see me about the incident.
“Mr. Manager, that man did not have a real gun. It was a toy.”
I could not believe what I was hearing. If the major was concocting a story about what had happened it meant that there were some high-ranking people who wanted to see me gone.
“Listen, major, ” I told him. “I am not a solider and I don’t even like guns, but I know the difference between a real gun and a toy. That sergeant was carrying a real gun.”
“It was not. This is what our investigation has shown.”
I thought it best to keep a stone face. I thanked the major and he left. Shortly thereafter a friend high up in the government, who I should not identify, came to my house and made plain what I already knew to be true.
“Paul, I have heard they want to kill you so that other business interests can take over the management of the Hotel Diplomates, ” he said. “But the object now is not to kill you out in the open. It is too dangerous politically. They will pretend they are arresting you and taking you to prison, but you will disappear and your body will never be found.”
The choice now seemed clear to me. I could open up my treasured black binder once again and start dialing all my Army friends for protection. But it would be like living the genocide all over. Years ago I had looked forward into my future as a church pastor and seen nothing but rural banality waiting for me. Now I imagined my future as a Rwandan hotel manager and saw nothing but constant fear and an eventual knock on the door after midnight. I loved my job and I loved my country, but not enough to die for them and leave my children without a father. My family and I quickly flew to Belgium and applied for political asylum. We had remained in our own country slightly more than two years after the genocide.
We may have left Rwanda, but Rwanda will never leave us. Those thousand hills were imprinted inside us forever. There are times today when I walk down a street and smell a fire burning in a hearth and instantly I am back in Nkomera, and it is evening, and my father is coming back from the village with a butchered goat on his back and my mother has lit the fire for supper and the shadows of the banana trees are long on the hillsides.
And there are times when I will be in some public place, in a small crowd at a bus station, for example, and I suddenly cannot bear the presence of the other people because I see them holding machetes. They are always grinning at me.
Tatiana and my children have similar troubles and it is not uncommon for one of us to awake screaming in the middle of the night. When this happens I always come in and hold whoever it is, and we talk in quiet voices, in Kinyarwanda, until calm comes once more. It is the best therapy, I think, to simply talk about the things you have seen, and we have talked hundreds of times together about the dreadful things we have lived through. We will probably be talking about them together as long as we are alive, a conversation that will never end.
It is not such a bad thing to start one’s life afresh. I was forty-two years old. We had a lot of bad memories, but we were all in good physical health and we all had hope for a better life in our new country. I had always liked going to Belgium on vacation and it would be free of the violence and fear that I wanted to be done with forever. As a twentieth-century colonial power Belgium had done wretched things to Rwanda, and its conduct during the recent genocide was not honorable, but I never held the actions of its government against the people at large, who were generally very likable and decent to me.
Belgium has a very generous social service net for its citizens, and even for the recent immigrants, but I felt very strongly that I did not want to live on public assistance or take any kind of handout. I was restless and eager to go to work. Since managing a hotel was not in the cards for me anymore, I decided to become another kind of manager. I had a little cash saved up from the Diplomates contract and I used twenty thousand dollars of it to buy a Nissan car and a permit to run a taxi company. The city of Brussels requires you to take an exam to be a taxi driver and I passed on the first try. I was now a company with one employee: myself. There is a saying in Rwanda: “If you want to own cows you must sleep in the fields with them.” In other words, money comes only with long workdays. So I started going to work at 5:00 A. M. and coming home at 7:00 P. M. The streets in Brussels are tangled like spaghetti, and many switch their names after only a few blocks, but I quickly learned the major arteries and then started to master the side streets. I cruised all over the city dozens of times in a day, usually with a stranger in the backseat, a businessperson usually, or somebody with dealings at the European Community headquarters.
Most of the people who were in my cab for more than half an hour became my friends. Quite a few were talkative people and would want to know the name of my home country. When I told them “ Rwanda ” it usually led into conversations about the genocide, which most everyone had heard about. I was occasionally not in the mood to talk about it, but on most days I was, and I would answer their questions as best I could. There were just a handful of passengers, on very long rides, who got to hear me tell the story of the Hotel Mille Collines, and they always left my cab in silence.
Sometimes very early in the mornings, when the sun was not yet up, I would cruise on the cobblestones of the Place des Palais, past the antique lamps in front of the neoclassical Royal Palace where King Leopold II had lived in the early part of the twentieth century. His monarchy had been propped up and financed by the occupation of the Congo and the fantastic profits from rubber exports. But his agents had used terrible force to collect the rubber from the Africans and had instituted an economy that was slavery in all but name. They were known for chopping the hands from able-bodied men who failed to make their quotas. Their colleagues had not been so systematically brutal in Rwanda, but they were the instigators of the divide-and-conquer strategy that turned Hutu against Tutsi, brother against brother, all for the sake of profit.
The profits had come to this marbled jewel of a city, and I circled around it in my taxicab, alone, looking for anyone who might need a ride.
There is not much left to tell about my new life in Belgium. My wife and I made some friends from Rwanda -fellow postgenocide immigrants like us-and they have their own stories to tell. When the evening is late and the empty glasses multiply on the coffee table, we will sometimes talk about what we have seen with each other, and there will be crying and gentle embraces. We have friends among other Rwandans who have lived here a long time and were fortunate enough to be elsewhere when the killing started. One thing is unique among these expatriates: We haven’t the slightest regard for each other’s status as a Hutu or a Tutsi. I think the shared experience of being a stranger in a semistrange land makes us all just Rwandans, and for that I am proud of my countrymen.
About fifteen thousand of us now make the old colonial capital our home, and there are a few specialty stores where we can buy goods that remind us of where we came from. We go to each other’s baptisms, marriages, and funerals and it is enormously good for us to hear Kinyarwanda and drink beer with others who understand us in a way that the Belgians never can. These events usually go on well into the evening and are accompanied by hours of talk, laughter, and dancing. I suppose these are ordinary enough rituals for an immigrant, but it means so much to me to feel that connection with my old country.
But as Rwanda will always be with me, so too will the genocide. It is as much a part of me as the shade of my eyes or the names of my children; it is never far from my thoughts and I cannot talk for more than one hour with a fellow Rwandan before one or both of us will begin to tell a story or make a reference to what happened during those three months of blood in 1994. It is the darkest bead on our national necklace, and one we all must wear, no matter how far we have traveled to get away. Killers still walk free in Rwanda and in the world, and through my mind. I remember one evening in Brussels, at a banquet after someone’s wedding, when I saw a familiar face in the crowd. It was a man I hadn’t seen in years, a Hutu neighbor of mine from the Kabeza neighborhood where my family and I had lived. I had seen him in the opening days of the genocide wearing an Army uniform and carrying a machete. It seems likely that he participated in some murders, or at a minimum did nothing to stop them. And here he was, free and healthy and wearing a business suit. There was nothing I could do about it, either. I stared into my drink. My wife wondered why I had suddenly gone quiet, but I could not tell her until we had gone home. I did not want to talk to this man. I never wanted to see him again, and so far I have not.
These banquets we have together frequently take place in the rented basements of various churches around Brussels. Church is not an uncomfortable place for me to be, but I rarely go to worship on my own. My wife is still a faithful Catholic, but I am what you might call a lapsed Seventh-day Adventist. It was enormously disappointing to me that so many priests and pastors caught the hateful virus in 1994 and refused to do anything for those who were begging them for help. The church remained mostly silent when it should have been speaking out in a loud voice. Its failure to stand strong in this critical hour was equivalent to complicity. It still disturbs me that houses of prayer could have been transformed into killing zones.
I still believe in a kind of Higher Power that is the origin of all we see around us, but I am not one who prays much anymore. I felt that God left me on my own during the genocide. I have many troubling questions that I fear will go unanswered until the day I die. I share this yearning in the heart with many other Rwandans. Was God hiding from us during the killing? It used to be that God and I shared many drinks together as friends. We don’t talk much anymore, but I would like to think that we can one day reconcile over an urwagwa and he will explain everything to me. But that time is not yet here.
Some of those people who lived through the genocide with me have gone on to what might be called happiness, or at least a future without too much pain or fear. Odette Nyiramilimo became close to the new government and was appointed to secretary of state for the Department of Social Affairs. She is now a senator in the Parliament of Rwanda. Her husband, Jean-Baptiste, reopened his clinic in the heart of Kigali and continues to see patients every day. My journalist friend Thomas Kamilindi took a job with the British Broadcasting Company as a correspondent in Rwanda, where his honest and unflinching news reports continued to irritate those in power. He recently accepted a fellowship at the University of Michigan.
For others, the future was bleak. My other journalist friend Edward Mutsinzi, who swore a blood oath in Room 126 to protect my children, was captured and tortured by RPF soldiers shortly after the liberation of Kigali. For some reason, they thought he had useful information. They beat him to a pulp and left him for dead. A squad of Australian soldiers attached to the United Nations found him lying in the dirt and helped save his life. He lives today in Belgium, blind and unable to work. Another man who swore that oath with me, John Bosco Karangwa, grew sick and died in 2001. His wife and children live nearby and I visit them when I can.
Aloise Karasankwavu, the bank executive who tried to persuade me to flee with him to Murama, wanted to help rebuild my country at the end of the civil war. He had just passed an exam to be the director of one of the nation’s largest banks, BCDI, when he was thrown in jail on bogus charges of helping carry out the genocide. He died in his cell one night of suspicious causes. No autopsy was performed.
The top architects of the genocide have mostly been rounded up and taken before the International Criminal Tribunal in Tanzania. The colonel accused of planning the genocide, Theoneste Bagosora, is still on trial as I write this. So is the head of the national police, Augustin Ndindiliyimana. My friend Georges Rutaganda, the vice president of the Interahamwe and the main supplier of beer and toilet paper to the Mille Collines, was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity in 1999. He was specifically charged, among other things, with organizing the massacre at the Official Technical School where the killings began minutes after the UN jeeps disappeared down the road. As for the priest who wore a gun instead of his robes, Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, he now lives in exile in France. A judge there brought charges against him in 1995 for the crime of genocide. His case is still caught in the slow gears of the French judicial system and may never be resolved.
I have no idea what happened to that neighbor of mine I called Marcel, the clerk I saw wearing a military uniform and carrying a machete on the morning of April 7, 1994. As far as I know, he has melted back into a normal life and is now going to work, paying his taxes, and raising his children.
General Romeo Dallaire suffered emotional stress and was voluntarily relieved of his command the month after the end of the war. Back in Canada, he wrestled with posttraumatic stress disorder and was found one night in 1997 curled in a fetal position under a park bench, drunk and incoherent. Dallaire has since found a new life as an author and a lecturer and is now a fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His old boss, Kofi Annan, is now the secretary-general of the United Nations.
President Bill Clinton stopped over in Rwanda on March 25, 1998, and offered an apology for America ’s failure to intervene. He stayed for approximately three hours and did not leave the airport.
The daughters of Tatiana’s brother now live in our home in Brussels. We raised them as our own children and they are both healthy and doing well in school. They have no memories of the violence and the awful ordeal they had been through, for which I am grateful. But they will never know their parents. My brother-in-law and his wife vanished without a trace after that first night when the president was assassinated. We can only assume they were slaughtered and their bodies are now in an anonymous mass grave somewhere. I hope their ending came without much suffering, and I also hope that wherever they are they might know what lovely girls their babies would one day become.
Our relatives in Rwanda tried the best they could to begin life anew. They still raise cows and bananas in the hills near Nyanza. We decided not to remove my mother-in-law and her grandchildren from the banana pit where they had been buried, but placed a memorial stone on top of it instead. I can only hope they are resting in peace wherever they are. The house knocked over by the militia was never rebuilt. A pile of rubble stands there today and weeds grow over it. As for my own family, I have lost four of my eight siblings. One died of illness, one died in a car accident, and two were killed by the rebel army. For a Rwandan family, this is a comparatively lucky outcome.
My children sometimes ask me why it all happened and I don’t have any final answers for them. The only thing I am able to do is to keep talking to them about what they have seen and how they feel about it. I will listen to them for hours and hours into the night, and sometimes they listen to me and my own bad memories. Roger and I both know, for example, what it is like to face a former friend across the divide of ethnicity. And all of us know what it is like to see people we knew stacked in heaps by the side of the road and to feel that awful helplessness in the face of evil. I did not grow up with any understanding of modern psychology, but I do feel the best way to get rid of bad memories is to speak them out loud and not keep them fermenting inside. It is the best therapy. Words can be instruments of evil, but they can also be powerful tools of life. If you say the right ones they can save the whole world. I thank God that my own father never had to experience the genocide and see the hatefulness in the heart of his country, but I also think he would have known how to use words against the darkness that comes and keeps coming long after the killing is over.
With hard work and a lot of early mornings I earned enough money to buy a second taxi-this one was a Mitsubishi-and hire another driver. The cash flow was slow but steady, and I eventually accumulated enough capital to branch out. I felt strongly that I wanted to invest in Africa. But Rwanda was not a possibility because I could not travel freely there. Through some friends I learned of an opportunity to buy into a trucking company in the nation of Zambia, a former British colony many miles south of Rwanda. It is an English-speaking country, so I am able to do business there easily. We now have a fleet of four trucks that haul canned goods, beer, soda, and clothing to rural villages from the capital city of Lusaka. Our trucks can haul most anything imaginable, and it always makes me happy to sign a contract with an international aid organization bringing something to a needy area.
My income was good enough for us to buy a slim postwar town house just fifty meters outside the city limits of Brussels proper. It is something of a joke among my friends that I take such pride in this geographical detail, for it allows me to say I live in a “suburb of Brussels.” After so much angst as a young man over the idea of living in a city I have finally come to rest in suburbia. Diane married a man who works for a company that manufactures hospital equipment and Lys married a self-employed businessman. Roger has gone to work for Accor hotels and may one day become a manager like his father. Tresor is still in school. In the afternoons I drive him to his soccer games and we practice his English in the car. It is getting quite good. I keep trying to lose weight, but I have a taste for steak and potatoes and the French wines whose names and qualities I first learned in college. My doctor has told me to stop drinking so much coffee because it makes my blood pressure go up. Most of the time I listen, but sometimes I sneak a cup more than I should. Pictures of my family are on the fireplace mantle, and there is a basketball hoop mounted in the backyard.
All in all it is a contented life, and I want no more adventure in it. I would have been happy to have lived out my remaining time as a good husband to my wife, a decent father to my children, and a safety-conscious driver for my passengers, with what happened at the Hotel Mille Collines only a private memory, a forgotten episode in history. I went through hell and lived to tell the story, but I never expected to tell the story to you quite like this. The way it happened is a brief footnote.
One day in 1999 the telephone rang. On the line was a young man from New York named Keir Pearson who said he was researching a screenplay on the Rwandan genocide. A friend of his had been traveling in Africa at the time and had heard the dramatic radio interview given by my friend Thomas Kamilindi. The young man from New York had borrowed money from his girlfriend to buy an air ticket to Rwanda and wanted to talk to me. I said, sure, come for a visit on your stopover to Kigali. The story of the Mille Collines was already well known. It had been told on the BBC and the Voice of America and other radio programs. But nobody had put it on film.
I spent an hour with Keir Pearson in my town house and was impressed with his sincerity, as well as with his desire to get the story correct. His business partner was an Irish film director named Terry George and together they made the movie Hotel Rwanda about my experience. There were a few dramatic embellishments, but I know that’s typical for Hollywood movies, and the story was very close to the truth. The movie earned Academy Award nominations for Pearson and George as well as for the two main actors, Sophie Okonedo and Don Cheadle, whom I later befriended. I was happy he was chosen, for he is a fine actor and much better looking than I.
It was very strange for me to be called a “hero” the way that I was when the movie was released in Europe and America. I was invited to the White House to meet President George W. Bush, who told me he saw the movie twice. I started giving lectures about the current state of affairs in Africa today and the importance of truth and reconciliation in the aftermath of genocide. With the help of some friends I started the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation to provide education and health care to the thousands of orphans and homeless children who live in Rwanda today. Nearly half a million children were left parentless by the murders. The others, the younger ones, are what are known as enfants du mauvais souvenir, or “children of bad memories.” They are the ones whose mothers were raped, impregnated and left to survive. Quite a few are HIV-positive from birth. Most of them never knew a mother’s unconditional love because of the terrible way in which they came into the world. My foundation is dedicated to funding orphanages and medical treatment and to providing education for these lost children so that they may know some hope and not become a part of a future surge of evil in Rwanda. We cannot change the past, but we can improve the future with the limited tools and words that we have been given.
Words are the most powerful tools of all, and especially the words that we pass to those who come after us. I will never forget that favorite saying of my father’s: “Whoever does not talk to his father never knows what his grandfather said.” So I decided to write this book for the sake of the historic record.
I am a Rwandan, after all, and I know that all things pass away but history. History never dies. It is what defines us as a civilization, and we live out our collective histories every day, in ways both good and evil. Over and over people kept telling me that what I did at the Mille Collines was heroic, but I never saw it that way, and I still don’t. I was providing shelter. I was a hotel manager doing his job. That is the best thing anyone can say about me, and all I ever wanted. And that’s really the best I have to give.