He was later able to use these connections to good effect. He was meticulous and careful and used his position to get to know the regulars, including many in the military and government. This was quite a coup for a black man working in a luxury hotel in Rwanda. The French owners of the Hotel Mille Collines recognized his talent and sent him to hotel school and later placed him as manager. He was detail-oriented and fit the job of hotel manager very well. Paul placed the blame for the genocide primarily at the feet of this station, which, it turns out, actually was government-run after all.īut back to Paul and how he was able to be effective in his role as hotel manager. But gradually it used its power to reach people to spread a message of hatred against the Tutsis. At first it was all fun and provided a pleasant contrast to the government-run stations. In the early 1990s a civilian radio station came on the air. Yet one of his close friends from childhood, with a Tutsi father and Hutu mother, was defined as Hutu and was forced to leave school. Paul had a Tutsi mother and a Hutu father. In fact, the two groups had been mixed for many years, to the point where almost everyone was really neither one or the other, and the two were never that different in the first place. This distinction served the Belgians well but in no way reflected reality. Simply put, it was white conquerers, particularly Belgian, who set the hutus against the tutsis by defining the different groups prejudicially: the tutsis were the refined, intelligent leaders, while the hutus were only suitable for slave labor, essentially. Through this volume we become familiar with the history of Rwanda. He also provided Paul with an example of a person untainted by the absurd prejudices of the time. He hid people during an earlier attempt at genocide, in the 1950s. His father was a leader in his village, and he was not afraid of death. He gives us quite a clue when he tells us about his childhood. He calculated that he saved a matter of a few hours' worth of deaths, based on the rate of killing in those few months, a rate unsurpassed by any other genocide in recorded history. Rusesabagina saved over a twelve hundred people from death during the short massacre in Rwanda in 1994. The title was, to me, offputting initially.
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