English Audio Request

A father of one with a laid-back manner and an acute intelligence, Sam talks about the sense of loss that carries on into a new generation. "I have a friend. His son asks why he does not have any uncles like some of the other children at the school..." His white Corolla takes us out of Kigali into a landscape of small, neat farms growing bananas, maize, sorgham and cassava. Later we cross the floodplain of the looping Nyabarango river, where the drenched fields of sugar cane are punctuated by eucalyptus and brightly flowering trees.
A Tutsi, orphaned during the mass slaughter, the first part of Sam's schooling in the time before the genocide was in the hugely discriminatory ethnic quota system that made only 15% of secondary school places available for Tutsis regardless of merit. After the genocide he continued his studies in a school system broken by the inheritance of mass murder.
He tells me the story of how his father, a Baptist pastor, was killed. "He was caught at a road block. They asked for his ID. When he said no, they said, it doesn't matter now. We know. Before they killed him he asked them to let him to pray. He prayed in French at first but at the end he prayed in Kinyarwanda. He said: 'God, you have been with me in difficult times and now you are permitting me to die. But I ask you this: when in the years to come these men who will kill me ask for forgiveness, forgive them.' Then he was killed."
This account of what happened was given by the killers during their trial. Later he says: "I can't delete what happened. I am not like a computer. I can't change the fact that I have no parents and that my son has no grandparents. It cannot be wiped out."