“I can take you to the Mille Collines if you want,” a voice said softly as I enquired in the Indian journalists’ media room in Kigali, Rwanda, about visiting the iconic hotel that had sheltered more than a thousand people at the height of the Tutsi genocide in 1994. I turned to see a tall young man who had helped me with Internet connectivity the previous day.
Severn is a Tutsi, the community that was targeted during the genocide. It was with great reluctance that he volunteered to take me, making it was apparent that he did not wish to take the line of questioning further. He and his father had fled to Uganda in the north, while his mother and sister took shelter in Congo just a few months before the three-month bloodbath left 800,000 people dead. He was an information technology professional when we met and his company was providing IT services for the hotel where we were staying.
“We were the lucky ones,” he told me. “We left Rwanda before April 1994. (Rwandan) President Paul Kagame had told us it is time we thought of the country and not just what happened. Unless pressed, we don’t volunteer to reveal who we are, Hutus or Tutsis. It is thinking on these lines that brought us to this state.”
Moving on
But is suppression of identity really the answer, I asked. “You have been to the genocide memorial, we know what happened to us. But if we keep revisiting it, how will we move forward?” he replied.
I asked him whether life was good now. His answer, that he wished to join a company that would offer him stock options, made us both burst out in laughter.
He listened carefully as I spoke to the sales manager of the Mille Collines, Paul Kato, for my story. As we left, he turned to me and said: “You said that the staff of this hotel were brave. I think the staff of the Mumbai hotels (Taj and Oberoi Trident) that were attacked by terrorists (in 2008) were also very brave. At least that’s what we read.”
And then he said: “Ask them if they want to think only of that time.” I grew quiet.
When much of the world has been captured in cartographic lines and dots, Africa continues to spring surprises, if not by its stunning topography then by its soul, surprisingly redemptive and always elemental.
