I SUPPOSE THAT every capital city in Africa -even those of the poorest countries-must have a place like the Hotel Mille Collines near its heart.
All the impoverished nations on earth, in fact, have these few basic things: a flag, an army, borders, something resembling a government, and at least one luxury hotel where the rich foreign visitors and aid workers can stay. When operatives from the Red Cross in Geneva or researchers from Amnesty International in London come here on their missions, they don’t stay in local guesthouses. They stay where they are treated to high standards of comfort-even though they’ve come to work on uncomfortable problems like AIDS, deforestation, torture, and starvation. So there is always a demand for a spot of opulence in a nation of mud houses. It is not all bad. A few hundred locals get decent jobs as chambermaids, waiters, and receptionists. Some elite suppliers get food and beverage contracts. Most of the profits, however, are shuttled back to whatever multinational company owns the property. The cost for a room is usually equal to the yearly income of an average person in that country. I am not saying this is right. But this is the reality of modern Africa. And so in every impoverished nation on the continent, from Burkina Faso to the Central African Republic, you can inevitably find that one hotel a short walk away from the embassies where fresh laundry and gin and tonics are taken for granted and where there is an aura around the place that prevents any peasant from ever thinking of going inside.
In Rwanda, that place is the Hotel Mille Collines.
It is a modernist building of five stories, with a facade of stucco and smoked glass. From the outside it would look perfectly at home near any large American airport.
The Mille Collines was built in 1973 by the Sabena Corporation, which was the national airline of Belgium until it went bankrupt a few years ago. It was founded as the Société Anonyme Belge d’Exploitation de la Navigation Aérienne, a mouthful of a brand name later shortened to the acronym Sabena. It started off flying short cargo runs between Boma and Léopoldville and branched into passenger service. The executives foresaw the demand for an island of stateless luxury in the dirt streets of Kigali, and so they built the Hotel Mille Collines, aimed primarily at the diplomatic and humanitarian trade but with an eye toward snaring the occasional adventurous tourist on his way to see the gorillas in the north.
There is only one way in or out of the Hotel Mille Collines: a two-lane driveway leading to and from the gate inside and the paved street outside. You could walk, it is true, but almost anyone who stays there would be driven in. The gate leads into a parking lot landscaped with colorful African plants and shrubs and surrounded from the outside world with a fence of bamboo poles. A line of flagpoles flies the national banners of Rwanda and Belgium and the corporate flag of the airline. There is a turnabout for cars to deposit their passengers at the lobby. You can feel the crisp blast of the air conditioner a few feet in front of the door. The lobby is tiled with sand-colored flagstones and decorated with potted plants and wicker couches. The staff behind the reception desk has been trained to greet all visitors cordially in French and English. There are a few shops that sell all the things a tourist might want: suntan lotion, aspirin, a carved figurine or a colorful African-print shirt as a gift. The indirect pinkish light filtering in through the big windows to the north and the tasteful fruit colors in the lobby give the place a tropical feeling. I have been told the entrance of the Mille Collines resembles that of beach vacation resorts in Fiji or Mexico. Off to one side is a small suite of offices for the general manager, the assistant general manager, and an agent of the airline.
Upstairs are 112 guest rooms, each one furnished according to the standards of upscale Western lodging. There are televisions with hundreds of satellite channels in multiple languages, beds with firm mattresses, shaving kits wrapped in protective plastic, circular cakes of soap. There are bedside phones guaranteed to give you a dial tone, a shower with safe water, a small strongbox with an electronic combination for your passport and money. The rooms smell like lavender cleaning solution. Those facing the pool are more expensive and have balconies shaped like half diamonds, where you can step out for a view of Kigali. Those facing the parking lot have false balconies so the sides don’t look flat when viewed from the outside.
On the top floor is a small cocktail bar and also a set of conference rooms for visiting corporations or aid groups to hold their presentations. There used to be an unwritten rule in the elite circles that if your meeting wasn’t held at the Mille Collines it wouldn’t be taken seriously.
Down the hall from the bar and the conference rooms is the Panorama Restaurant. Here you can get escargots or chateaubriand or crab soup of a quality-and at prices-that match what you’d find in Brussels, Paris, or New York. Every morning there is an extensive breakfast buffet with good strong Rwandan coffee and five kinds of juices and a staff of waiters lurking discreetly in the background, watching for an empty cup or a dropped fork. If you’re dining as a couple two servers will deliver the food to your table all at once so you will be disturbed for as brief a time as possible. The restaurant has no north wall-it opens up to a striking al fresco view of the Nyabugogo valley. You can see houses clinging to the far hillsides and the Boulevard of the Organization of African Unity, which runs to the north side of town and the airport. On the farthest hill in the distance is the black doughnut of the national soccer stadium, with banks of lights rising on poles from its outer walls.
The air in Kigali is sometimes hazy from farm dust and heavy with truck exhaust, but the view is always gorgeous and the sun never hits the dining tables directly. The Belgian architects saw to that by orienting the restaurant on a diagonal of the compass, away from both the sunrise and sunset. And when it rains, they simply close the blinds.
The most important place in the Hotel Mille Collines is on the lowest level. This is the rear courtyard, where there is a tidy lawn, a huge fig tree, and a small swimming pool without a diving board. There is also an open-air bar with about twenty tables and a few ceiling fans to push the air around. Ten more tables-the best ones-are set up in an L pattern around the pool.
Around this small square of water is where the real business of the Mille Collines is conducted. What takes place here far surpasses the day-to-day management worries of the hotel. Some people have even called it the shadow capital of Rwanda. You can probably guess why. It is the spot where the local power brokers come to share beer and ham sandwiches with aid donors, arms dealers, World Bank staffers, and various other foreigners who have some kind of stake in our country’s future.
Worlds intersect here. Whites and blacks mingle comfortably here inside a thin cloud of cigarette smoke and laughter. Rick’s American Café in Casablanca had nothing on the Mille Collines. I have seen cabinet ministers dispense appointments here, Army generals buying Russian rifles, ambassadors telling casual lies to presidential flunkies. The poolside is a place to advertise that you are a man with contacts and friendships. This is one of the best ways to climb the ladder in Kigali. These casual acquaintances are what can separate a wealthy man from a beggar.
I first laid eyes on the Mille Collines when I was nineteen years old. As a typical bored young man on my hill I hitched rides to Kigali whenever I could to wander the streets, browse through the markets, gawk at girls, and drink in the bars, all the typical idle pastimes of youth. The hotel had just been constructed and everybody was coming by for a look. It was then the tallest building in Rwanda and the first with an elevator. Few people had seen such a thing before. The big coup was to sneak inside and see if you could ride the elevator to the roof, where you could get a truly marvelous view of the valley below. Much to the envy of my friends back at home, I was able to charm my way past the bellboy and take that elevator ride up to the forbidden roof, where I savored a few stolen minutes of beauty. I remember feeling impressed with the hotel and proud of my country, thinking this place represented progress, and that a better way of life was on the way for all of us.
I had no idea just how large a role this strange new place was going to play in my life-or in the life of Rwanda.
I am a hotel manager by accident. The idea of having a career in the luxury hospitality business is certainly a laughable one for the son of a banana farmer from an impoverished African village. I never could have dreamed such a thing, nor could any of my friends.
I was supposed to have been a church pastor. This was a path that seemed preordained for me from a very young age. Everybody said I was suited for it because of my willingness to work hard, but even more because of my temperament. My peers in school-even those I wasn’t close friends with-seemed to trust me with their secrets, and I always gave them advice that seemed practical to them. (You might say it was igihango all over again.) The teachers were also impressed with my ability to memorize sections of the Bible and rephrase them in plain language. They encouraged me to become a man of the church. It was always seen as the way up, at least to the people who ran my school. They belong to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, a very distinctive branch of Christianity. The Sabbath is celebrated on Saturdays, for instance, and Adventists make it a habit to avoid eating shellfish, pork, and other foods forbidden to the Jews. The most devout Adventists are vegetarians. They also do not believe in the idea of hell and live in intense anticipation of the second coming of Jesus.
On the top of a high hill overlooking the beautiful Ruvayaga Valley, missionaries had built a church and started a school for boys in 1921. They chose that piece of land because it had been used as an execution ground by a previous mwami and nobody from our area wanted to live there for fear of bad luck or death. The missionaries wanted to show their new followers that the old religions of Rwanda had no power and that their god was the only one. They eventually moved away to spread the gospel elsewhere, but their hilltop school remained. We called it a “college, ” but it was intended for students of all ages. It was designed in a simple but elegant manner, with the academic buildings arranged around a quadrangle. A row of teachers’houses lined the broad dirt avenue that led into town, surrounded with the now mature orange and guava trees planted by the pioneer churchmen. The centerpiece of the campus was a small stucco church in the European cathedral style, painted a soft blue. There was a large main classroom hall that looked like a railway station divided into four classrooms, each with tall windows and furnished with rows of severe wooden desks that had seats and footrests built into them. The plaster walls were painted the same baby blue as the church. Each room had a rectangle of black paint on the front wall that served as the blackboard.
I learned French at age eight, English at thirteen. I still remember the cover of the first book I ever owned, a textbook called Je Commence, or I Begin. I struggled the first year and resolved to do better. The next year my scores were among the highest in my grade and I saw my father’s pride when my name was called during the honors assembly on the grassy quadrangle.
In religion classes they taught us Christian hymns. Some of them were tedious, but others were quite beautiful. My favorite was a mournful song called “The Salesman of Vaud” about a glamorous Swiss lady who wanted to buy some jewelry from a tattered old peddler, but all he had to give her was a copy of the Bible. She read it and her soul was saved. I had seen very few European ladies at the time, but those words seemed so sweet and wistful as we all sang them together inside the squat hilltop church:
Oh! Look at, my beautiful and noble lady,
These gold chains, these invaluable jewels.
You see these pearls of which the flame
A flash of your eyes would erase?
Though I seemed headed for a life of Christian modesty, there was always a streak of the entrepreneur in me. Even as a ten-year-old I was gathering up peanuts and reselling them for a profit. Hard work appealed to me. Where other teenage boys liked soccer and girls, my hobby was painting houses for people in the village. This was where I first learned the art of negotiation. I would start my price far above what I expected to receive and coyly ratchet it down according to what I saw in the face of the man who wanted his house painted. I earned a reputation as a tough bargainer but a conscientious painter. There was never any spot uncovered, and I used attractive shades of blue and indigo. I would get up very early in the morning to start a job, eat something small for lunch, and keep working through the fading light, until I could hear the gasoline generators in town start up.
Though I earned good money I was never prey to bullies or to jealous thugs. I suppose I was adept at using the same skill at negotiation that made house painting such a lucrative business. If anybody tried to threaten me I would simply look him in the eye and ask him in a firm but friendly voice, “Why?” The bully would have no choice but to engage me verbally, and this made violence next to impossible. I learned that it is very difficult to fight someone with whom you are already talking.
On September 13, 1967, at the age of thirteen, I was baptized in the waters of the Rubayi River and was allowed to choose a new first name for myself. This is a ritual that merges a bit of traditional Rwandan culture with the Christian rite. To the endless confusion of outsiders, members of a single family here do not usually share the same last name.
My surname, Rusesabagina, was chosen especially for me by my father when I was born. In our language it means “warrior that disperses the enemies.” I was allowed to choose a new first name on the day of my baptism and I chose “Paul, ” after the great communicator of the New Testament, the man who described himself in one of his letters as being “all things to all people.”
While I seemed to have a natural gift for languages and banter, I was unfortunately not gifted in the art of making conversation with girls. They had a powerful fascination for me from the time I was about twelve or so, but I think I would have rather had a burning ember pressed into my tongue than talk to a pretty girl. So I never had a girlfriend in the conventional sense. But around the time that I was leaving my teenage years behind me and becoming a man, one young woman in particular started to develop an interest in me. Her name was Esther and she was the daughter of Reverend Sembeba, one of the African pastors of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and a very powerful man in the region. I fell in love with Esther and we made plans to get married. Our plan was for me to attend seminary and become a minister and she would come with me wherever I was posted. Then we would start having children.
My good behavior and my interest in religion earned me a scholarship to attend a school called the Faculty of Theology in the nation of Cameroon. It was more than a thousand miles from the hillside where I had grown up, but it would be a free education, and a good one at that. So on September 8, 1976, Esther and I were married in the baby blue church at the top of the hill. It was one of the happiest days of my life up until that point. I had presented her father with a cow, as is the Rwandan custom, and my friends brought in more cows to the reception as a symbol of the prosperity that the marriage was going to bring us. Milk from the cows was passed around and we held up the cups to one another. A few days later we said good-bye to everything that was familiar, caught a ride to Kigali, and boarded a flight to the city of Yaoundé. Neither of us had been on an airplane before.
I cannot say I have very fond memories of my time studying to be a pastor. Many of my fellow students were bright and eager, and I enjoyed picking apart biblical passages with them, but a good number of them also had no interest in being there. Quite a few of them were Tutsis who had no hope of finding any other job and were turning to the church for an escape from prejudice. The instructors taught us Greek so that we could read the New Testament in the original language. I cannot speak a word of this ancient tongue today, but I do remember the thrill of reading Christ’s words. I still remember how powerful and in control I felt the first few times I delivered practice sermons before my instructors. But it became apparent to me that this was not a line of work I was suited for. For one thing, it seemed that the life of a pastor was going to be a dull one. I had tasted enough of the modernizing world to be enchanted with it-the airplanes, the elevators, the azure swimming pools-and the job of African gospel preaching did not go hand-in-hand with that kind of lifestyle. If I was going to lead a Seventh-day Adventist flock, I wanted it to be in Kigali at the very least, where I could live an urban life. But only a very few senior men, five at most, were privileged enough to have such a posting. And those men had won their prize jobs not through luck but through lifelong mastery of church politics. I looked into the future and did not like what I saw: a long sedentary life spent in a backwater village, getting older and hoping for a promotion that never came.
This anxiety about my future got me thinking about more troubling things. If I was not prepared to make such a sacrifice was I really cut out to be a worker in the Lord’s vineyard? It was supposed to be the duty of every Christian to crucify his own flesh and put aside his own earthly desires for the sake of heaven. What did it say about my fitness for the pulpit if I was so disheartened about the road opening up in front of me?
It was in this unhappy state of mind that my wife and I moved to Kigali in December 1978. And it was there I found the place where I truly was meant to be. Or rather, it found me.
I had joined the great restless drift of young men who move to the capital city in search of something: a job, adventure, new girlfriends, the army, anything at all to break the dull monotony of country life. I think this is one of life’s essential journeys and it happens in every nation and in every culture on earth: a young person in search of his fortune. During that wandering period before the age of twenty-five a man’s shape is still undefined. His opinions tend to be passionate and wild but still essentially pliable, his character still open to molding by the friends or the circumstances that surround him. Several years after I arrived in Kigali the forces of history would do wretched things to the minds of those young men who had come in search of the same modest goals I was pursuing. But I am getting ahead of the story.
Kigali sprawls over more than a dozen steep hills near the geographical center of Rwanda. It is one of Africa ’s more relaxed capital cities, with a modern airport, a pleasantly unrushed market district, wide avenues shaded with jacaranda trees, and a notable lack of the desperate slum quarters that tarnish so many other African capitals. The main roads are well paved and free of potholes. Most of the architecture is of the late-1960s institutional style and the majority of houses are made of the same adobe bricks and corrugated metal roofs you see in the back-country. But on clear evenings you can climb to the top of Mount Kigali and look out over the chain of valleys and the soft twinkling lights on the hillsides and think that the old proverb is true, that God wanders the world during the daytime, but comes home to Rwanda at night.
An irony of my country is that the capital is in this beautiful place because of the racial divide. There wasn’t much of anything here except a small town next to a dirt airstrip until 1961. That was when the new government realized they could no longer stomach the idea of keeping the capital in the old royal Tutsi city of Nyanza, where the mwami had held court. The tiny village of Kigali, in the center of the country, was chosen as a new seat of government, mostly because it was a place that had no precolonial history, and therefore no baggage. In that sense it is a city very much like Washington in the United States or Canberra in Australia-an artificial capital plunked down in an obscure place to help quiet factional jealousies. When Esther and I moved into a rented house with our two young children in 1978 I resolved that I would stay here no matter what happened. I had found my place.
Fate had intervened, as it so often does, in the form of a friendship. I had a playmate from childhood named Isaac Muli-hano who worked behind the front desk at the Mille Collines. He had heard through the gossip mill that I had dropped out of the seminary and so he sent a message to me back on the hill where I was staying for a few weeks.“Come work with me in the hotel, ” he said. “We have an opening and you would be perfect.”
The hotel already occupied an exalted spot in my mind-it was the symbol of urbanity I had been craving-and I seized the chance to be a part of it. So I put on a white shirt and a tie and learned the art of how to put people in the right rooms, how to arrange for fresh flowers and taxi rides, and how to handle complaints with a smile and quick action. I seemed to excel at this last skill. It is one of the most complicated parts of working in a hotel-and where a service reputation can be made or broken. If you show the guest you really care about his problem and make him feel as though he is getting his way (even when he isn’t) it will give him a positive feeling about the hotel and the staff and make him inclined to come back for a repeat visit. I learned that most people just want to feel as though they are being heard and understood. It is a simple lesson, but one that so many seem to forget. The other clerks began to let me handle the really sticky complaints. I learned that I could usually make even the most irate guests leave the front desk at least a little mollified if I showed them I was listening.
Month followed month. I worked hard at my job. My managers were impressed with my command of French and English as well as with the cheerful attitude I tried to bring to work every day. At that time, a Swiss company named Tourist Consult had a contract to train all the new employees, and they put me through the program. While I was trying to make sure I was doing everything right, the training director, Gerard Rossier, came up to me and asked, “Why are you working at the front desk?”
The question surprised me.
“This is the job that I enjoy, ” I told him.
“You are not in the right place, ” he told me, and explained that Tourist Consult was offering ten free scholarships to the hospitality program at a college in Nairobi. I knew English and French and seemed like a responsible enough young man. Would I be interested in applying for one?
I thought that over for about half a second before saying yes.
The application process was only a formality. The only thing I needed was a signature from a government minister, who had to personally approve all the scholarship recipients. And this was where I got my first real taste of the patronage system.
The rift in my country is not just between Hutus and Tutsis. There is also a rivalry between Hutus from the northern part of the country and Hutus from everywhere else. After President Juvenal Habyarimana came to power in 1973, a tight circle of his friends from the north part of the country, especially people with family ties in towns like Gisenyi and Ruhengeri, managed to dominate all the key cabinet posts and high-paying civil service jobs. The minister, of course, hailed from the north, and I fell into that category of Hutu that came from everywhere else. I was also a desk clerk, the son of a banana farmer. Nobody with any political connections, either. That made me nobody, period. He refused to sign my application. Of course, they would not say so directly.
“Has he gotten a chance to sign my application?” I asked the secretaries.
“He is still reviewing your application. You should have an answer soon.”
I went back every day for a week and got the same answer. All the other scholarship recipients received their signatures, but mine was in an endless state of review. It became clear that more was holding up my application than just the usual molasses of bureaucracy. Even though my career was on the line, I would not allow myself to get angry. I understood immediately that it was all about business. It was not as if the minister had anything against me personally. It was that the hotel scholarship was now a commodity-no different from a case of beer or a Honda motorcycle. If I took that last slot it would be one less favor he could do for a hometown relative or a political acquaintance. Giving his signature to me would have been giving it for free, because I had nothing to offer.
It was a dismal lesson in politics. But I will never forget the counterlesson I learned from Rossier when I told him I couldn’t go to the college after all.
“Oh, really?” he said. “Why not?”
“The minister will not sign my application.”
“I see, ” said Rossier. “Let me take care of things.”
My signature came that very afternoon. I found out later that a simple message had been conveyed: Either Paul gets your signature today or we will never offer hotel scholarships to anyone in Rwanda again.
It seemed that there were multiple ways to solve a problem. And I was a fast learner.
In Nairobi I learned many more things. I learned about the various wine-growing regions in France, and how to tell Bordeaux from Burgundy. I learned what separates a good Scotch from an excellent one. They sent me to Switzerland, where I learned even more about fine wine and food. I learned how to do bookkeeping, write a budget, manage a payroll, hire and fire, plan institutional goals. And I learned the art of performing courtesies without making a show of it. The idea is to not be noticed in the act of doing something nice for somebody, but, of course, people will notice. People always notice.
I grew in confidence as a manager, but my personal life was not so happy when I was at college. Time and distance took a toll on my marriage. Esther and I grew further apart, and we separated in 1981. I was granted legal custody of our three children, our daughters Diane and Lys, and our son Roger. It was a wrenching experience, one of the saddest periods in my life, but I was sure of at least one thing when I came back home to Rwanda. My career path was at last known to me. I would be a hotel man, not a preacher. The Hotel Mille Collines was something like an old friend to me by then. My troubles in marriage had made me bitter and hurt, but I threw myself back into my work with vigor and not a little bit of relief. It became my solace.
I have since come to realize that those years studying to be a churchman were not wasted at all. It was where I acquired knowledge that helped to shape my future. I gained an even greater understanding of human beings-what motivates them, where their failings are, where the good might be found that can trump the evil inside. Another thing the ministry teaches you is how to present a forceful case in language that everyone can understand. Learning to be a preacher makes you a better talker. That was one skill that would certainly come in handy in my personal life. I discovered, for example, that I had lost my shyness around girls.
One day in 1987 I was invited to a wedding. I have never been a good dancer and so I sat on the edge of the crowd, nursing a beer and watching people dance. I could not take my eyes off a particular woman in a white dress. She was the maid of honor. She had a shy smile that made my stomach turn over like an upended bowl of pudding. I cannot remember to this day what we talked about, but I remember thinking that her ideas were as fresh as her appearance. We exchanged phone numbers and said good-bye, but I did not forget her. I learned that Tatiana worked as a nurse in the town of Ruhengeri in the north. She happened to be a Tutsi. I could not have cared less about that, but other people certainly did. She was suffering a huge amount of prejudice at her workplace and she wanted to leave.
At last, a matter of the heart where I knew what to do! I went straight to work. The minister of health was a frequent guest at the poolside of the Mille Collines and I arranged a favor. Tatiana soon received a transfer to Central Hospital in Kigali. By that time my divorce was final and I was a free man. I courted my new girlfriend assiduously and we married after two years. Diane, Lys, and Roger accepted Tatiana as their new stepmother almost immediately. Tatiana conceived and gave birth to a daughter, who perished before she could be given a name on the eighth day, according to the Rwandan custom. It made us all grieve. But before long, my wife was pregnant again and we brought my son Tresor into the world. And I settled into a loving family life, feeling like a complete husband and father once more.
My stock continued to rise at the Mille Collines, where I was made an assistant general manager. They gave me an office of my own, as well as the authority to dispense little perks here and there to favored guests. An Army general who came in frequently would get a free cognac, or perhaps a lobster dinner. It made them feel appreciated, which is a universal hunger among all human beings. The gifts were also an indication of their status in front of whatever companion they had brought in. This helped to not only cement their fidelity to the hotel, but to make them appreciative to me personally. If we had an important diplomatic visitor, I would give them the royal welcome at the front roundabout, asking them in courtly European tones about their trip and telling them we had a very nice room waiting for them, even when it was occasionally not so nice.
I learned to take my morning coffee not in my office but down at the poolside bar. At 10:00 A. M. some of the capital’s big shots would start to drift in. Some of them came in alone with reams of paperwork. Others brought their friends and coworkers. Most had the thick Rwandan coffee, some breakfasted on beer. The talk was a stew of personal chitchat and government business. I don’t know why so many of them thought of the Mille Collines as an office out of the office. Perhaps the walls had ears at their ministries. Perhaps it just felt more relaxed here. Whatever the case, an astonishing number of decisions were made next to the pool, and I watched it all happen from my perch at the bar. I learned to tell from subtle body language whether I should approach a table for some welcoming banter or whether it was best to remain invisible.
I know that my promotion was resented among some of the people I had worked with at the front desk. Some of them started to call me a certain name behind my back: muzungu, the Kinyarwandan word for “white man.” We used to yell it out gleefully to European aid workers and missionaries when we were kids. It was not insulting in that context. But applied to me it was meant to be insulting; the equivalent, I am told, of the American phrase “Uncle Tom.” I suppose this should have gotten under my skin, but it did not. For one thing, jealousies and backbiting are common to any place of work. Show me a place where more than ten people are employed, and I’ll show you a coiled spring where everybody’s favorite game is called who’s up, who’s down (I confess to having played it myself). For another thing, I never felt as though I was being untrue to myself. Just the opposite: I was learning a great deal about the way my country really worked and meeting people who had grown up in circumstances even poorer than mine. We had gotten where we were due to hard work and determination. Never once did I feel as though I was being untrue to the life my father had wanted for me since the first day he took me to school at Gitwe and told me that if I was willing to do the work I would be successful in the world.
I do not agree with those who say that you cannot be successful and authentic at the same time. If advancing in the world is viewed as a form of treason, then we are all in trouble.
So I tried not to let the mutterings of muzungu bother me, but a day came when I had to assert myself to my old friends at the front desk. The flashpoint was a phone call. Somebody had telephoned the Mille Collines and asked to speak with “the African general manager.” The call was clearly for me, but the receptionist, an old colleague of mine, insisted on taking the call himself. I think he wanted to show that he didn’t think much of me anymore. After that incident, I took him aside.
“Listen, my friend, ” I said. “Today, I am your boss and you must respect me.”
I made the same kind of point to my white coworkers, and again it was over something trivial. All the top department heads were supposed to meet weekly to discuss various issues, and these sessions required a secretary to take notes. I was always asked to do this. Eventually, I asked that the duty be rotated with each meeting, and my colleagues quickly agreed. A small point, but one that earned me respect in the long run.
Year followed year. I kept climbing. In 1992, I was made the general manager of the Hotel Diplomates, the other capital city luxury hotel owned by Sabena. It was a smaller property barely a half mile up the hill from the Mille Collines, but no less prestigious. The Diplomates catered mainly to ambassadors, presidents, prime ministers, and other dignitaries visiting Rwanda from other parts of Africa and the world. There were sixteen big luxury suites, forty regular rooms, a wide lawn, a resplendent terrace, and a very good restaurant called The Rotunda. I was no longer working in my beloved Mille Collines, but this was a huge step up the ladder. I had become the first black general manager in the company’s history.
It was a small distinction, I suppose, but I only wish my father could have seen it. He had died the year before, at the age of ninety-three in a hospital in the town of Kibuye, where he had gone for surgery. The light was still in his eyes the last time I saw him. He said a curious thing. “Listen, my son. You might meet hyenas on their way to hunt. Be careful.” It was very typical of him to talk in these kinds of parables, but I have wondered many times about what he meant. Perhaps he was just telling me to be careful that day on the drive back to Kigali. Perhaps it was meant to be a caution for the years to come. I’ll never know because my father died later that day. He was so important to me, a man who taught me most of what I know about patience, tolerance, and bravery. He had always wanted me to come back to my home to be the mayor, and I suppose on this count, I hadn’t quite lived up to his expectations. But I still knew that he had been terribly proud of the work I was doing in Kigali and that he loved me. I could not ask for too much more than that.
I regret immensely not being able to do something important for my parents before they left the world. They had given me their best when I was a child and, now that I was a grown man, I wanted to build them a new house on the hill or do something else to make sure they were comfortable. This is the Rwandan way. But shortly before my father died, my mother had gone in for a routine doctor’s visit and they found a cancer inside her. This strong and lively woman quickly grew frail and I was powerless to do anything about it. The last words she ever said to me were spoken from her hospital bed. “Son, I am going to my house now, ” she told me. I can only hope that, wherever she is today, her house is more splendid than anything I could have ever imagined for her.
As the general manager of the Diplomates I had to do a lot of negotiating. There were food contracts to be signed, employee grievances to be addressed, conference rooms to be booked, wedding receptions to accommodate. More often than not I conducted these talks inside the bar or in the restaurant. I had learned how friendship and business can be artfully juxtaposed without corrupting each other.
Let me explain. We have a saying in Rwanda, a leftover from the brief time when we were a colony of the Germans: “Dienst ist dienst, und schnapps ist schnapps.” It means “work is work and booze is booze.” There were often sticky issues to work through in my new job, but I had long ago discovered the value of a compartmentalized mind. You could never let your opinion of a person interfere with the business between you. He may be your best friend or somebody you detest, but the conversation should not change. Dienst ist dienst.
I met many people in Rwanda whose racial ideology I couldn’t stand, but I was unfailingly polite to them, and they learned to respect me even though our disagreements were obvious. This led to a priceless realization for me. Someone who deals can never be an absolute hard-liner. The very act of negotiation makes it difficult, if not impossible, to dehumanize the person across the table from you. Because in negotiation you will never get 100 percent of what you want. You are forced to make a compromise, and by doing this you are forced to understand, and even sympathize with, the other person’s position. And if cups of good African coffee, some wine, a cognac, or all of the above could help lubricate this understanding, it was all to the good.
So I spent as little time as possible shut up inside the walls of my office. I took my morning coffee at the bar, watched the comings and goings, made careful note of who the regulars were, followed the gossip about their careers, and saved up that knowledge for the frequent times when I would find myself clinking glasses of complimentary Merlot with a man whose friendship was another link to the power web of the capital and whose favor I could count on in the future. And the presence of beverages always kept the tone easy and social, even when the subtext of the discussion was quite serious.
It was just like my father had said: “You never invite a man without a beer.”