The Convoy — a survivor relives Rwanda’s genocide

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It is more than 30 years since that apocalyptic April when the then teenager Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse and her mother — along with hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis — found themselves being hunted in the world’s most ruthlessly efficient genocide since the Holocaust. The story of her time in hiding, the narrow escapes from the génocidaires, and then finally her flight to freedom with her mother, hidden under a rug on the back of an aid lorry, is agonising and remarkable; and she writes it with great poise and power in The Convoy, her memoir of those terrible days and their aftermath.

But this is far more than an account of that early summer of 1994 when world leaders knowingly averted their gaze from the horrors in tiny Rwanda, east Africa. It is a broader meditation on memory and on the literature of genocides — not least on who has the right to tell such a story.

“Grey blankets have been spread out to protect us from splinters from the wooden floor and to cover the dirt left behind by the various merchandise once carried in the vehicle,” she writes of the lorry in which she made her escape. “We have no commercial value. For the humanitarian workers we are a good deed, for the journalists a good story.”

This is also something of a personal quest: Rwanda’s and her own history are framed by the account of a two-decade-long detective mission to uncover how she survived and who made it possible, and thus to try to make sense of the nightmare that engulfed her homeland. In just 100 days more than three-quarters of a million people, mainly from the minority Tutsi tribe, were slaughtered by members of the majority Hutu tribe, primed by an extremist political faction and hate radio.

Her narrative is all the more powerful because she bides her time before plunging the reader back into what happened in her home town of Butare when the mass murderers set to work. The early chapters unfold in the years after those events as she makes a new life in western Europe and tries to come to terms with the genocide and how it is often misleadingly construed and understood in the rest of the world.

When she spools back to the genocide itself, her prose is so deft and diamond-studded it is as if the nightmare were last month. She had to hide in a basement, relying on the bravery of people she barely knew to survive. The details — the heat, the smell, the lack of food, the fear — all ring true. Her account of her discovery by a génocidaire bent on raping her — and her escape from him — is all but unbearable. 

But the heart of the book, first published in French in 2024, and beautifully translated into English by Ruth Diver, is her attempt to decipher the details of her own story. She chronicles how for years after 1994 she tried to trace the western humanitarian workers and journalists who saved her and her mother. They were both hidden in a lorryload of young children who aid workers drove and BBC journalists accompanied past the roadblocks of killers to sanctuary in neighbouring Burundi. Also in her sights is the bid to identify from an old photograph the other children who were saved with her.

Step by step she makes progress, frustrated often by the seeming lack of interest she encounters in people she seeks out to help her in her mission. She is admirable in her determination to ask sometimes uncomfortable questions of the reporters, the photographers and the aid workers who came to Rwanda in those days, and often then moved on blithely to the next story or disaster.

Whose stories are they, she asks, of the reporters who framed the individual survivors’ accounts with the sometimes callous simplicity of journalism? And, she asks, of the pictures taken: “Do those photographs not belong to us?” These are important questions, and I should know as one of the many reporters who arrived in Rwanda in the last days of the genocide.

Only towards the end of her account do you really understand the meaning of the grainy photograph on the cover of this deeply moving and arresting book. The author has waited three decades to tell her story. It has been worth the wait.

The Convoy: A True Story by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, translated by Ruth Diver Open Borders Press £18.99, 288 pages

Alec Russell is the FT’s foreign editor

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