Twenty years ago, in 1994, I had a golden summer. I scored 375 against England in Antigua, a Test record that stood for nine years, and two months later I posted 501 against Durham, which remains today the world record in first-class cricket, as my team Warwickshire achieved an unprecedented domestic treble. I was in my mid-twenties, and of course I was very happy, but I was also very aware that in another part of the world, a great tragedy was unfolding.
Every evening when I turned on the TV there were images of the genocide in Rwanda, and the contrast with my own feelings of euphoria haunted me.
It wasn’t until 2009 that I actually visited Rwanda, but when I did I knew I had to help in some way, and hearing the story of a young cricketer called Audifax Byiringiro helped me start to realise what I should do.
In April 1994, as I was gearing up for my golden summer, Audifax Byiringiro was a six-month-old baby in Rwanda. Audifax and his family — his mother, father and three siblings — sought refuge from the violence as nearly a million Tutsis were killed by their Hutu countrymen. For more than a month they faced death daily at rebel road blocks as they fled from the brutality, but by June his father and three siblings had been murdered and only he and his mother remained.
One day in the same month, on a field in a school in Kigali, 2,500 Rwandans were abandoned by UN peacekeepers and attacked by local militia with machetes, grenades and guns. The massacre took just a few hours, and by nightfall all but 50 were dead. The events were later depicted in the film Shooting Dogs.
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