An Ordinary Man

by Paul Rusesabagina

  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.”

  FOUR

  ON AUGUST 8, 1993, a new radio station went on the air. It called itself Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines. I would come to wish that the name of this station wasn’t so similar to that of my beloved hotel.

  The station broadcast at 106 on the FM dial and called itself by the call letters RTLM, in the American style. It billed itself as the very first private radio station in the country, and it was an immediate sensation. It started by playing Congolese music virtually nonstop. I am not a man who particularly likes to dance, but even I can tell you that this is a fun, bouncy, energetic type of music to which you cannot help but move your feet a little. RTLM then started to broadcast a few human voices, like a shy child finding its courage. The disk jockeys began to talk more. Then they started telling mildly dirty jokes. Then they started a call-in format in which ordinary Rwandans could hear their own voices broadcast over the air. People began calling in with road information, song dedications, complaints about local politicians, rumors, speculations, opinions, chatter. We have a saying here about the nature of neighborhood gossip. We call it radio trottoir-or, the “radio of the sidewalk.” RTLM was the radio of the sidewalk suddenly blasted out to the whole country.

  I can’t begin to tell you how revolutionary this was. Unlike the dull government marginalia you usually heard on the official Radio Rwanda, RTLM was fresh. It was irreverent. It was fun. It constantly surprised you. It was giving us what we wanted but in a way that was lively and modern and American. Even those who were offended were hooked. It was the giddiness that comes with looking at your friend in shock and saying, Can he really say that? Yes, I think he just did.

  Just as Rwandans are serious about history, we are also serious about news. You see small battery-powered radios everywhere in our country. They are playing on the edges of cornfields, inside taxicabs, in restaurants and Internet cafés, balanced on the shoulders of young men and old women and on the kitchen tables inside mud-and-pole houses on distant hills. Official announcements here can be as dry as sawdust, but we always pay attention. Perhaps it taps something in our national memory of the godlike pronouncements from the royal court of the mwami. It always amazes me how people in Europe and the United States can be so indifferent to the speeches of their chancellor or president, for these words from the top can be a wind sock for what might happen next.

  RTLM pulled off another feat. It convinced ordinary citizens that it could be trusted to give a truthful account of what was really going on inside the nation. And it did this by taking a skeptical attitude toward the current president, Juvenal Habyarimana. For a people who had been raised on a diet of official propaganda, this was something new indeed. Any voice that was less than worshipful toward the president had to be independent. There was even an aura of crusading journalism about the station, which did not hesitate to publicize the names of the bureaucrats who were supposed to be responsible for paving a potholed road or prosecuting a market thief.

  As the winter faded into the new year of 1994, the talk on the radio grew bolder and louder. Listeners couldn’t help but notice that almost every broadcast seemed to feature an overarching narrative. And that story was that the country was in danger from an internal threat and the only solution was to fight that threat with any means necessary. There were daily on-air debates that represented two sides-the extremist and the even more extremist. The station had helped gain credibility by shaming lazy government officials. Now it started to name ordinary citizens. And the tone began to change. A typical broadcast:

  Jeanne is a sixth-form teacher at Muramba in Muyaga commune. Jeanne is not doing good things in this school. Indeed, it has been noted that she’s the cause of the bad atmosphere in the classes she teaches. She urges her students to hate the Hutus. These children spend the entire day at that, and it corrupts their minds. We hereby warn this woman named Jeanne, and indeed, the people of Muyaga, who are well known for their courage, should warn her. She is a security threat for the commune.

  I wanted to stop listening to RTLM, but I couldn’t. It was like one of those movies where you watch a car speeding in slow motion toward a child in the middle of the road. It doesn’t seem real. You wince, you even want to scream, but you cannot look away.

  In fact, when I think back on what we all heard on RTLM in those strange slow-motion months before April 1994 it seems impossible that we could not have known what was coming.

  It always bothers me when I hear Rwanda ’s genocide described as the product of “ancient tribal hatreds.” I think this is an easy way for Westerners to dismiss the whole thing as a regrettable but pointless bloodbath that happens to primitive brown people. And not just that, but that the killing was random and chaotic and fueled only by brute anger. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  There is a reason why Rwanda ’s genocide was the quickest one in recorded history. It may have been accomplished with crude agricultural tools instead of gas chambers, but eight hundred thousand people were killed in one hundred days with a calculated efficiency that would have impressed the most rigorous accountant.

  Those “tribal hatreds” were merely a cheap way to motivate the citizen killers-not the root cause. It is phenomenally dangerous to dismiss Rwanda in this way, because it steals one of the most vital lessons all this bloodshed has to teach us.

  Make no mistake: There was a method to the madness. And it was about power. What scared our leaders most was the idea that Rwanda might be invaded and their power taken away. And in the early part of the 1990s t
hat threat was very real.

  The Tutsis who had fled the mobs years earlier for the safety of neighboring countries had always dreamed of returning home. Under the leadership of General Fred Rwigema, and subsequently of Paul Kagame (the same child who had fled the country on his mother’s back in 1959) they organized themselves into a military force called the Rwandan Patriotic Front. These soldiers were far outnumbered by the Rwandan army, but they still constituted an impressively disciplined and effective band of fighters. On October 1, 1990, they crossed the border and started moving toward the capital. This was not the amateurish vandalism of thirty years earlier. This was a real invasion.

  Three nights later, when the RPF was still a long way from Kigali, there was a clatter of gunfire all around the capital, including some mortar shelling. The next morning the government made a stunning announcement: Some rebels had managed to infiltrate their way into the heart of the nation and had staged a sneak attack. Only the bravery and talent of the Rwandan Army had saved the country from disaster, and only the deceit and cunning of traitors within the neighborhoods had made the attack possible.

  It was all a charade. What really happened is that some trusted Army soldiers were dispatched to various neighborhoods and told to fire their weapons in the air and in the dirt. The effect of the “surprise attack, ” as you might guess, was to spread fear that an enemy was hiding among the population. It was a cheap but effective way for President Juvenal Habyari-mana to rally the people to his side and shore up his weakening hold on power. Thousands of innocent people, mostly Tutsis and those perceived to be their sympathizers, were rounded up and thrown in jail on trumped-up charges. The minister of justice proclaimed that the attack could not have happened without the collaboration of hidden ibyitso, or “accomplices, ” and a curfew went into effect on the streets of the capital.