An Ordinary Man

This book is an incredibly easy read, though the content is horrifying to comprehend due to the shear scale of violence. This review really could have just been a collection of quotes; there are so many powerful moments throughout the autobiography. Terrifying, tragic and compelling in equal measure, Rusesabagina’s story is one of immense courage and faith. If it was purely fictional, I would categorise it as a thriller - such is the pace and structure of the narrative. An important take-away from this book (amongst many) is how successfully the local media was used to cripple an entire nation by using racist, insistent and creeping rhetoric. It utilised an “invented history” and created murderers out of friends.

“I have said that a false view of history is a toxin in the bloodstream of my country. With the start of the civil war the myth-making machine went into high gear. There was suddenly no distinction between Tutsis and exiled RPF rebels; they were lumped into the same category of rhetoric. The war itself was cast as an explicitly racial conflict.” And ordinary Rwandans started to arrange their lives around this idea.”

Rusesabagina artfully intertwines explanation of the devastating effects of Europe’s powerful backing of cultural divide, with his own experiences of growing up in the beautiful countryside of Rwanda. Both his heritage as an elder and Pastoral training perhaps account, in part, for his careful eloquence and clear love for his countrymen and women; alongside his impressive capacity for seeing the bigger picture. Descriptions are detailed and rich, highlighting the many aspects of his nation that should be treasured, especially by readers who otherwise may just retain an image of bloodshed and brutality.

“If geography creates culture, then the Rwandan mind is shaped like solid green waves. We are the children of the hills, the grassy slopes, the valley roads, the spide patterns of rivers, and the millions of rivulets and crevasses and buckles of earth that ripple across this part of central Africa like the lines on the tired face of an elder. If you ironed Rwanda flat, goes the joke, it would be ten times as big.”

He has a wonderful ability to break down a complicated political history and lucidly explain the creation of divide in his country, which eventually resulted in civil war and genocide. Unsurprisingly, it has its routes in colonialism. He explains how British Explorer John Hanning Speke, upon arriving in Africa made “superficial observations” about the people he came across, and likened them to characters from the Bible. Rusesabagina explains that Speke noted two physical differences between the people of Rwanda - some called themselves Tutsi, and were taller and had slightly more angular noses. They measured their wealth in cattle, and ate beef and dairy. The others - the Hutu, were shorter, and led mainly agricultural lifestyles. Speke saw a “divine purpose behind the difference in lifestyle.” He decided that the Hutu’s were likely descendants of Noah’s sinful son Ham, and therefore the statement “the lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers” somehow applied. This decision (that the Hutu’s should be subservient to the Tutsi’s) carried a great amount of weight as the colonial powers carved up Africa in the nineteenth century, creating borders “that frequently had no logical relation to watersheds, trade patterns, linguistic groups, or geography.”

“Heres how crazy it became. Belgian scientists were sent down to Rwanda with little measuring tapes. They determined that a typical Tutsi nose was at least two and a half milimetres longer than a Hutu nose. This brand of ’scientific’ race theory led directly to a particularly dark bead on our necklace:the year 1933, when all people in Rwanda received identity cards know as books that specified their ethnic class. Years later these cards would become virtual death warrants for thousands of people.”

The story unfolds as the lead up to the civil war began in 1994. As the manager of the Hôtel des Mille Collines, the author describes how he and his family fled to the central building for safety as the killings began.

“Those first months of 1994 were like watching a speeding car in slow motion heading toward a child. There was a thickness in the air. You could buy Chinese-made grenades on the street for three dollars each and machetes for just one dollar and nobody thought to ask why.”

Using only his powers of persuasion, bribery and the secret ledger of powerful contacts he had collected throughout his time at the hotel, Rusesabagina saved the lives of over a thousand victims of persecution by housing them in his luxury rooms. They drank out of the swimming pool as he gave away the hotel’s bottles of vintage wine, in place of sacrificing his charges. He stayed even as he was offered refuge in other areas, determined to protect everyone in his care. In just three months, eight hundred thousand people were slaughtered across the country - but nobody staying in the Mille Collines-turned-refugee-camp was killed. His descriptions of the genocide are graphic and lengthy, though written without an obvious political bias. His scathing reports of lack of international action particularly hit home in consideration of the situation in Yemen, amongst others, where the world again seems to have turned it’s back.

“Rwanda was a failure on so many levels. It started as a failure of the European colonists who exploited trivial differences for the sake of a divide-and-rule strategy. It was the failure of Africa to get beyond its ethnic divisions and form true coalition governments. It was a failure of Western democracies to step in and avert the catastrophe when abundant evidence was available. It was a failure of the United States for not calling a genocide by its right name. It was the failure of the United Nations to live up to its commitments as a peacemaking body. All of these come down to a failure of words. And this is what I want to tell you: Words are the most effective weapons of death in man’s arsenal. But they can also be powerful tools of life. They may be the only ones.”

Rusesabagina’s experiences and knowledge meant that he and his family had to flee their home country shortly after the genocide, to claim asylum in Brussels, where they now reside. Paul was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George Bush in 2005. His deep insights into humanity at it’s worse are more relevant now than ever, with the world stage facing serious change in a short space of time. He writes in his final chapters -

“A sad truth of human nature is that it is hard to care for people when they are abstractions, hard to care when it is not you or somebody close to you. Unless the world community can stop finding ways to dither in the face of this monstrous threat to humanity those words Never Again will persist in being one of the most abused phrases in the English language and one of the greatest lies of our time.”

“Breaking the cycle will not be easy. It requires the application of true justice. Without justice there will be more massacres, for widespread injustice never fades away. It ferments and stinks and eventually bursts into bloody flowers.”

“Wherever the killing season should next begin and people should become strangers to their neighbours and themselves, my hope is that there will still be those ordinary men who say a quiet no and open the rooms upstairs.”

We live in deeply conflicted times, and yet we are more connected than ever before. There is no excuse for racism or ignorance. Understanding our past is crucial for a sustainable, fair future across our shared planet; and reading stories such as these are a vital way to ensure we can - and do - break the cycle.