Though I earned good money I was never prey to bullies or to jealous thugs. I suppose I was adept at using the same skill at negotiation that made house painting such a lucrative business. If anybody tried to threaten me I would simply look him in the eye and ask him in a firm but friendly voice, “Why?” The bully would have no choice but to engage me verbally, and this made violence next to impossible. I learned that it is very difficult to fight someone with whom you are already talking.
On September 13, 1967, at the age of thirteen, I was baptized in the waters of the Rubayi River and was allowed to choose a new first name for myself. This is a ritual that merges a bit of traditional Rwandan culture with the Christian rite. To the endless confusion of outsiders, members of a single family here do not usually share the same last name.
My surname, Rusesabagina, was chosen especially for me by my father when I was born. In our language it means “warrior that disperses the enemies.” I was allowed to choose a new first name on the day of my baptism and I chose “Paul, ” after the great communicator of the New Testament, the man who described himself in one of his letters as being “all things to all people.”
While I seemed to have a natural gift for languages and banter, I was unfortunately not gifted in the art of making conversation with girls. They had a powerful fascination for me from the time I was about twelve or so, but I think I would have rather had a burning ember pressed into my tongue than talk to a pretty girl. So I never had a girlfriend in the conventional sense. But around the time that I was leaving my teenage years behind me and becoming a man, one young woman in particular started to develop an interest in me. Her name was Esther and she was the daughter of Reverend Sembeba, one of the African pastors of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and a very powerful man in the region. I fell in love with Esther and we made plans to get married. Our plan was for me to attend seminary and become a minister and she would come with me wherever I was posted. Then we would start having children.
My good behavior and my interest in religion earned me a scholarship to attend a school called the Faculty of Theology in the nation of Cameroon. It was more than a thousand miles from the hillside where I had grown up, but it would be a free education, and a good one at that. So on September 8, 1976, Esther and I were married in the baby blue church at the top of the hill. It was one of the happiest days of my life up until that point. I had presented her father with a cow, as is the Rwandan custom, and my friends brought in more cows to the reception as a symbol of the prosperity that the marriage was going to bring us. Milk from the cows was passed around and we held up the cups to one another. A few days later we said good-bye to everything that was familiar, caught a ride to Kigali, and boarded a flight to the city of Yaoundé. Neither of us had been on an airplane before.
I cannot say I have very fond memories of my time studying to be a pastor. Many of my fellow students were bright and eager, and I enjoyed picking apart biblical passages with them, but a good number of them also had no interest in being there. Quite a few of them were Tutsis who had no hope of finding any other job and were turning to the church for an escape from prejudice. The instructors taught us Greek so that we could read the New Testament in the original language. I cannot speak a word of this ancient tongue today, but I do remember the thrill of reading Christ’s words. I still remember how powerful and in control I felt the first few times I delivered practice sermons before my instructors. But it became apparent to me that this was not a line of work I was suited for. For one thing, it seemed that the life of a pastor was going to be a dull one. I had tasted enough of the modernizing world to be enchanted with it-the airplanes, the elevators, the azure swimming pools-and the job of African gospel preaching did not go hand-in-hand with that kind of lifestyle. If I was going to lead a Seventh-day Adventist flock, I wanted it to be in Kigali at the very least, where I could live an urban life. But only a very few senior men, five at most, were privileged enough to have such a posting. And those men had won their prize jobs not through luck but through lifelong mastery of church politics. I looked into the future and did not like what I saw: a long sedentary life spent in a backwater village, getting older and hoping for a promotion that never came.
This anxiety about my future got me thinking about more troubling things. If I was not prepared to make such a sacrifice was I really cut out to be a worker in the Lord’s vineyard? It was supposed to be the duty of every Christian to crucify his own flesh and put aside his own earthly desires for the sake of heaven. What did it say about my fitness for the pulpit if I was so disheartened about the road opening up in front of me?
It was in this unhappy state of mind that my wife and I moved to Kigali in December 1978. And it was there I found the place where I truly was meant to be. Or rather, it found me.
I had joined the great restless drift of young men who move to the capital city in search of something: a job, adventure, new girlfriends, the army, anything at all to break the dull monotony of country life. I think this is one of life’s essential journeys and it happens in every nation and in every culture on earth: a young person in search of his fortune. During that wandering period before the age of twenty-five a man’s shape is still undefined. His opinions tend to be passionate and wild but still essentially pliable, his character still open to molding by the friends or the circumstances that surround him. Several years after I arrived in Kigali the forces of history would do wretched things to the minds of those young men who had come in search of the same modest goals I was pursuing. But I am getting ahead of the story.
Kigali sprawls over more than a dozen steep hills near the geographical center of Rwanda. It is one of Africa ’s more relaxed capital cities, with a modern airport, a pleasantly unrushed market district, wide avenues shaded with jacaranda trees, and a notable lack of the desperate slum quarters that tarnish so many other African capitals. The main roads are well paved and free of potholes. Most of the architecture is of the late-1960s institutional style and the majority of houses are made of the same adobe bricks and corrugated metal roofs you see in the back-country. But on clear evenings you can climb to the top of Mount Kigali and look out over the chain of valleys and the soft twinkling lights on the hillsides and think that the old proverb is true, that God wanders the world during the daytime, but comes home to Rwanda at night.
An irony of my country is that the capital is in this beautiful place because of the racial divide. There wasn’t much of anything here except a small town next to a dirt airstrip until 1961. That was when the new government realized they could no longer stomach the idea of keeping the capital in the old royal Tutsi city of Nyanza, where the mwami had held court. The tiny village of Kigali, in the center of the country, was chosen as a new seat of government, mostly because it was a place that had no precolonial history, and therefore no baggage. In that sense it is a city very much like Washington in the United States or Canberra in Australia-an artificial capital plunked down in an obscure place to help quiet factional jealousies. When Esther and I moved into a rented house with our two young children in 1978 I resolved that I would stay here no matter what happened. I had found my place.
Fate had intervened, as it so often does, in the form of a friendship. I had a playmate from childhood named Isaac Muli-hano who worked behind the front desk at the Mille Collines. He had heard through the gossip mill that I had dropped out of the seminary and so he sent a message to me back on the hill where I was staying for a few weeks.“Come work with me in the hotel, ” he said. “We have an opening and you would be perfect.”