More than 30 years ago today, when the then-adolescent Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse and her family were forced to flee Rwanda in 1994, in the most ruthlessly effective murder since the Holocaust. The Convoy, her narrative of those agonizing days and their aftermath, is agonizing and extraordinary, and she writes it with excellent elegance and strength in the narrative of those bad days and their fallout. It is the story of her time in hiding, the narrow escapes from the génocidaires, and suddenly her flight to freedom with her mother, hidden under a rug on the back of an aid lorry. This is more than just a report of the early spring of 1994, when world leaders benevolently shone a hat to the horrors in small Rwanda, west Africa. It is a more general reflection on memory and the genocide writing, not the least of whom has the authority to tell a story. She describes the vehicle in which she made her escape as “gray pillows have been spread out to protect us from shards from the earthen floor and support the mud left behind by the various items once carried in the vehicle.” We lack no economic benefit. For the reporters we are a good history, and for the humanitarian workers a good contract. More than three-quarters of a million people, primarily from the minority Tutsi community, were killed in only 100 days by members of the lot Hutu community, primed by an extremist political party and love television. Her ability to captivate the reader before taking the reader back to the events that occurred in her hometown of Butare when the mass murderers began their rampage makes her story even stronger. In the years that followed those events, she tries to reconcile the genocide and how it is frequently misinterpreted and interpreted in the rest of the world. She also begins to explore how the genocide is perceived in the years that follow. Her prose is so skillful and diamond-studded that it seems like the nightmare was from last month when she spools back to the genocide itself. She had to hide in a basement, relying on the bravery of those who she hardly knew to survive. The specifics, such as the heat, smell, lack of food, and fear, all ring true. Her account of being discovered by a génocidaire intent on raping her and escaping from him is all but intolerable. However, Ruth Diver’s exquisite translation into English and her first French publication in 2024 serves as the book’s central work. She explains in detail how for years after 1994 she unsuccessfully attempted to trace the western journalists and humanitarian workers who had saved her and her mother. They were both concealed in a lorryload of young children that aid workers drove, and BBC journalists who followed them past the killers ‘ roadblocks to find rest in neighboring Burundi. In her mind is also the attempt to identify the other children who were saved with her from an old photo. She makes progress gradually, frequently frustrated by the apparent lack of interest in those who she seeks out in order to aid her in her mission. She frequently moves on blithely to the next story or disaster by asking occasionally uncomfortable questions to the reporters, photographers, and aid workers who came to Rwanda in those days. Whose stories, she asks, were those of the reporters who used the occasionally callous simplicity of journalism to frame the individual survivors’ accounts? And she inquires about the photographs taken,” Do those pictures not belong to us”? These are significant inquiries, and I should be aware of them as one of the many reporters who traveled to Rwanda in the wake of the genocide. Only toward the end of her account can you fully comprehend the meaning of the obscene image on the cover of this profoundly moving and arresting book. The author has been putting forth a three-decade story for her. The wait has been worthwhile. The Convoy: A True Story by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, published in English as a translation for Ruth Diver Open Borders Press, is published online at FT Books Café. Follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X-Lens.
The Convoy, a veteran, recalls Rwanda’s murder.
