An Ordinary Man

by Paul Rusesabagina

  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 dul
l 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.