Wild life | 25 August 2012

Kigali

Eighteen years after Rwanda’s bloodbath I disembarked from my flight and was surprised to see that mortar craters no longer pitted the airport tarmac. At a city café where I recall Hutu militias swigging lager next to a pile of severed hands, I saw a pretty blonde in a short dress, shades, red lipstick, reading a book. My sniper alleys were lined with streetlights where young Rwandans walked home from work; the dunes of stinking corpses had become business parks.

My contact hadn’t changed a bit. He still smokes like a soldier but his hair, like mine, is turning white prematurely. His kids came with him to collect me from the hotel. ‘Did your father tell you what he did in the war?’ They shook their heads. ‘He never talks about it.’ ‘He was my guardian angel,’ I say. My friend had escorted me in a column of fighters all the way from Uganda to Kigali across the hills, fighting all the way, wading through rivers clogged with bodies, through villages of putrefaction. We woke to the thump of mortars and observed massacres unfolding on opposite hillsides, the screams heard on gusts of wind.

I finally returned to Rwanda to do business, not to cover a war. ‘It’s time,’ my white-haired friend agreed. ‘Don’t we deserve to smell the roses?’ For decades I’ve worked as a hack and lived on the whiff of an oily rag. Along the way I’ve picked up diseases, an alcohol problem, debts — but I’ve also found myself in the trenches with interesting people. They fought to overturn dictatorships and to introduce a degree of democracy in Africa and became the leaders of their countries. I never thought about using my contacts.