Spent the day at the genocide memorial in Kigali, listening to one of the guides tell his personal story. Serge was 14 when the genocide began. The genocide marched into his living room the evening of April 8th, 1994. There were eight armed men. They attacked his father and ordered him to kneel. His father knelt, immediately, as though he had known all along what was to happen. One of the men pulled a knife and Serge shuts his eyes. But then – a miracle! – the leader of the rebel group offers to take money in exchange for his life. Suddenly, the whole family is racing around the house, pulling bills out from drawers and pots and secret cabinets. The cash piles up in the bandit’s palm until he says, okay. He orders his men to withdraw, but not before warning the family that they’d be back in three days to kill them. “You know, I almost see them as kind,” Serge says. “For giving us a head start.”
Serge and family flee, first to relatives, then to another village, then finally back to their local school. The school is already packed with thousands of families, there is no room for them. So they continue on, are seized at a roadblock, and Serge’s father, and his older brother, are bayoneted and left on the road. Later, Serge is told that his father’s death probably took three days. Serge escapes by donning women’s clothes and fleeing with his mother and sisters through the marshes to the local church.
And it is a testament to Serge’s incredible powers as a storyteller that, remembering this moment, a wry smile plays on his face. “We thought if we could just get to the church, at last we’d be safe,” he says. The error of that assumption became clear when he saw the pastor, greeting them at the doorway of the church, a loaded pistol strapped to his hip, and a flak jacket in place of vestments. “Hello, cockroaches,” he told the women.
For the next month, they endured starvation and disease, and ambushes by soldiers. The soldiers would choose women and girls and drag them off to the bushes. The women would not return. For a while the Red Cross was providing some food but then more refugees came and the Red Cross could not get the food past the roadblocks. So then they had no food. “At this point we knew we were going to die,” Serge said. “So then there was no more fear.”
Some of the killers were superstitious. They didn’t want to murder anyone on church grounds. They would send in child soldiers to choose their victims. Serge remembers a boy came up to him, a boy probably eight years old, dressed in full battle gear. Serge was lying immobile on the church floor, next to a classmate from school. The child soldier smacked Serge in the face with a slipper.
A slipper?
“Uh, yes a slipper?” Serge says, “Like is on the foot?” He points to his own polished black shoes, then continues his story. “So I look at this boy, and he looks at me,” he says. They just… stare at each other. And then the boy points to his friend. “You,” says the boy. “Come.” The teenager rises. As he stands, he squeezes Serge’s leg goodbye.
If Serge is telling you this story, he will at this point lean over and squeeze your knee. His light fingers will make a spider around your kneecap. It will even tickle a little. “Like this,” he’ll say. “This is how he said goodbye.”
Serge tells his story – and there is much more – in an unbroken narrative. He never once takes a drink of water. He has told this story a thousand times, maybe more. He accepts questions gracefully and with humor. He is charming, sweet, optimistic, and forgiving. He is studying to be an accountant.
14 years later, I stumble out of the memorial, dazed, sunburned, dizzy. Billboards rise monumentally over a city that seems to be all of it under construction. “Picture Success,” shouts a bank ad showing a smiling bespectacled young woman with chin upraised. “We’ll Help You Achieve It.” An ad for a local beer bills itself as “The Taste of Success.”
Out that night, drinking the same beer with a young man, Jean Marie, who is also studying to be an accountant. “I have over one hundred American friends,” he brags. The television plays Bob Marley tributes and the bar is called Copa Cabana. “That’s my friend,” Jean Marie points to a guy next to me at the bar. “Be The Best.”
Excuse me? His name is…?
“BeTheBest”, says BeTheBest. “Nice to meet you.”
“We also call him Cheezo,” Jean Marie adds.
Bethebest wears a black and white checkered shirt streaked with yellow with an enormous collar and a shtetl hat like my grandfather’s; he looks like a cross between a Chicago bootlegger and a pro bowler.
“Why are you called Be The Best?” I say.
“Because I want everyone to be the best at what they are,” says Bethebest. “The best it can be. Just like you are smiling? Now? And we are talking? This is best. Just like this.”
