Over the years the Kigali Genocide Memorial has been visited by countless celebrities and dignitaries; Angelina Jolie, Matt Damon, Natalie Portman, Ben Affleck, Ban Ki Moon, George Bush and Bill Clinton to name just a few. The centre’s tour guides like Honore, Henriette, Serge, Emmanuel and David would guide them completely unfazed by their stardom…
Category: Travel
Retracing the Footsteps of Our Paris Engagement
I had always said to my then girlfriend Sarah that I would never propose to her in Paris; ‘it’s too cliche,’ I had said, but it was a ruse, a little white lie, that ensured a certain element of surprise. I wanted it to be a surprise for Sarah had hardly dropped any hints about…
My friends, the survivors
I settled in to my role as an adviser at the Kigali Genocide Memorial – I got a desk, there was wifi and I had a workplan agreed with my boss Freddy. My colleagues made me feel at home as soon as I was introduced to them at our Monday morning meeting. What struck me at…
The Chatter of the Raindrops
Continuing the series Letters from the Heart of Africa. My first few nights in Rwanda brought me shallow, dreamless sleeps; when I awoke I was unsure that I had even slept at all. My new home was so different to my home in London. The birdsong, distant voices from the street in unrecognisable tongues, the…
The Shimmering Lake in the Shadow of the Volcano
In the very heart of Africa, between Rwanda and D.R. Congo, is a silvery, majestic lake framed by breezy palms and sandy shores. Beside her sits an angry old volcano, at his top sits a lake of red hot lava. Because the volcano’s lava would now and again spew down his slopes and swallow forests,…
Stolen socks and missing underpants
One morning I phoned my friend Thierry. “Someone’s stolen my clothes.” “I can lend you clothes,” he said. Thierry was resourceful and full of solutions to problems – he could get things and repair things, and looked after the centre’s building and maintenance. “No but they’ve stolen my socks. Even Peter didn’t see anything.” He…
Banana-leaf balls, making friends and a bitter falling out
The twin pillars of passion in Rwanda are Christianity and English Premier League Football. The sides of the small buses, the mutatus, are adorned with colourful reminders of this: Wayne Rooney; a picture of Christ; Steven Gerard; sayings from the Bible; a picture of Didier Drogba; the Virgin Mary. Strangely the juxtaposition isn’t incongruous on…
We Need To Talk About Why People Kill Each Other
Continuing the series, Letters from the Heart of Africa No narrative on Rwanda can really ever avoid the genocide. Its magnitude and barbarism is unfathomable. In 1994, one million people were murdered in a hundred days; neighbours and friends turned on each other; the nature of the killing was especially cruel with the majority killed by…
The Little Fish Mystery
This is a true story that happened in my kitchen – it involves multiple murders, male-only breeding, a sex-change and suspected cannibalism. It’s also about my pet fish. It had all started so well: a glass fish tank, pure white sand, aquatic plants, ornamental rocks, a bubbling filter and a small heater that kept the…
The importance of memory
Continuing the series, Letters from the Heart of Africa. We all want to go places, forwards, like a car, pressing on the gas, looking out of the windscreen; but to be really safe, we need the rear-view mirror. And so it is with memory in Rwanda, for there, memorials, like the Genocide Memorial Centre, take…
The blue hill and the temple of the goddess of love
Assam, in India’s north-east, is known as the Land of the Red River and the Blue Hill. The Red River is the Brahmaputra, by now on its course from the Tibetan plateau it’s rich with red silt and keeps the valley fertile; its slow glide seems to set the pace here, for Assam is also…
Help! I’m a businessman going to work in an NGO in Africa
One of my life goals was to volunteer in Africa but I was never quite sure if my career path could ever take me there. What use would I be in an NGO in Africa? Surely African NGOs needed doctors, nurses, teachers, humanitarian workers and engineers – not suited business people like me. How wrong…
