I was drinking the excellent breakfast tea on the hotel terrace, soaking up the ambience of the tropical morning, gazing over the slightly misty valley at the church down below and listening to the faint but entrancing singing of the choir. I was in the Hotel Rwanda, the establishment featured recently on the silver screen.
The former priest of the church in the valley is now dodging extradition in Europe after fingering members of his flock for handover to the machete-wielding mass murderers outside. For my appointment at one agency, I walked past a memorial to dozens of staff hacked to death a decade before. One of the surviving staff was reliably suspected of rounding up those who were about to die, but apparently the main witness was the one he had let go, and so felt obliged not to give evidence against him.
Rwanda is a strange country. Thousands of imprisoned mass murderers wander around on work parties, unsupervised but very visible in their pink overalls. None of them seems to feel the compulsion to escape. While I was there, the authorities released (or expelled) from jail a prisoner accused of being a ringleader of the genocide. Apparently, he was agitating the other prisoners too much by defending the killings of up to 1 mn Tutsis ten years ago.
Yet everything seems perfectly peaceful. In Kigali, the only real worry late at night is getting a drink because everything closes so early on weekdays. When Rwandans want a good time, they go across to Goma in Congo, where the atmosphere is much more festive – although this seems macabre, as the wars there are still raging.
In the Hotel Rwanda – actually called Hotel Milles Collines (thousand hills) – I met a Wall Street financier researching the ultimate in emerging markets: Rwanda. I admire his enterprise, but he won’t be getting my pension fund in a hurry.
Rwanda is a real-time experiment into whether Thomas Malthus was right. Many of its thousand hills are volcanoes, and the combination of volcanic soil, mountainous tropical climate and steady rainfall makes it incredibly fertile. For most people in Rwanda, the only occupation is farming, and many farmers are making their living from near-vertical plots of land on the hillsides, as those are only ones left in this over-crowded country.
One of the explanations of the massacres, apart from the fact that the then government ordered an incredibly obedient population to carry them out, was that they were a disguised way of freeing up land. There were sons unmarried in their 30s because their fathers or brothers stubbornly refused to die, and there was not enough land to endow a new family. That was as Malthus predicted: geometrically increasing population by pushing against physical limits.
As I sipped my beer in the Goma nightclub, I wondered whether I was seeing the future. When Social Security is out of government hands and our pension funds can be inherited by our descendants, will our children, faced with increasing college fees and house prices, decide they could spend it when we are gone – if only we would go a little more quickly?
Recast your living will, parents and grandparents, and hang on to your feeding tubes. Life can be cheap and loyalties weak when survival is at stake.
