Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
man in that village killed a Tutsi. A friend, a neighbour, somebody they'd known since
they were children.'
'There's more,' I said, tracing the bullet holes scored into the cell wall. 'There was fight-
ing here.'
'When the genocide began, hundreds of Tutsi were rounded up and brought here. The
Hutus crammed them, eighty into a cell, before they opened fire.'
I was standing in the scene of a massacre, in a place that had later been used to imprison
those responsible. Twenty years had passed, but the feeling of dread in the air was still
palpable.
'Amani,' I ventured, not knowing if it was the right thing to ask, 'what happened to you
in 1994?'
But Amani only shook his head and brushed past Boston as he made to leave the cell. 'I
will tell you stories about Rwanda, Lev, but not my own. It is too painful.'
That night, in our camp beneath the prison, there was quiet. As the red African sun descen-
ded into a horizon clad with pines, the river turned the colour of copper. I trailed my hand
in the water. I was thinking, again, of how this same water would one day reach the coast.
But I was thinking, as well, about the thousands of Tutsi corpses that had been thrown into
this same river as a kind of symbolic gesture, the Hutus sending the Tutsis back home to
North Africa, from whence they believed they had come. The prison looked down on us,
the mellow sound of the river filling my ears, and I knew for certain then that this was go-
ing to be a journey through the past as well as the future.
