Strength in What Remains

Strength in What Remains

I’ve just finished reading a book called “Strength in What Remains” by Tracy Kidder, a biography of a young Burundi male medical student named Deo who escaped the genocides of both Burundi and Rwanda to make his way to New York City. Then, in a near-miraculous series of fortunes and misfortunes, he advances to a financial position where he can return to his home country to help with its rebuilding.

By itself this is a fascinating and compelling story, horrific in some spots, despairing in others, and often depressing. And yet, I was also left with an uplifted feeling and was glad that I had read the book, if, for no other reason than to get a clearer picture of the Hutu and Tutsi rivalries in those two countries.

But what really hit me was the realization of how close by, geographically, I had been to Deo’s flight from Burundi/Rwanda and yet how far I had been from comprehending what was happening in Deo’s world.

The situation was that, in early April of 1994, just prior to the historic election in South Africa that made Nelson Mandela the president of his country after twenty-seven years as a political prisoner, an extraordinary story in itself, I was in South Africa as a consultant to a medical school in the Transkei, a black “homeland” established during apartheid. This was the South African approach to “separate but equal”, yet another story.

But at this particular time, just before the beginning of the Rwandan genocide, I was attending a banquet at a South African winery near Stellenbosch, in the heart of Afrikaaner land, as a guest of my Transkei medical school host for those several weeks of consultation. He was attending a Pan-African Oncology Research Conference and the banquet was part of the offerings of the conference. That in itself was quite a story—a white winery hosting a banquet for mostly black Africans, although there were a few white South African doctors and researchers there as well. The banquet hall was filled with surgeons, oncologists, public health officials and other well-educated, well-connected African black elites. At our round banquet table of eight, all men and all black except for me, a white female—but that’s also another story—there were Ugandans, Kenyans, my South African surgeon host, and, to my left, a Rwandan surgeon working in Kenya. We struck up a conversation, the Rwandan doctor and I, as dinner guest do, trading professional titles and positions, and wandering a bit into personal histories of birthplace, schooling, and so on.

Then we were interrupted by one of the Ugandans on my right. “Say, Professor, did you hear? On the telly today? He asked. “No,” said the Rwandan doctor, “I was traveling all day.” “Well,” said the Ugandan researcher, “there was an incident. Your President’s plane was shot down and he was killed. Along with some others, I don’t know who.”

The Rwandan doctor’s face turned ashen, the palest shade I’ve seen on a black man. He closed his eyes, turned his head slightly upward, as if to heaven, and said, “Oh my god! There’ll be war. And all of my family are in Rwanda.” And then he left the table.

Just a few days later, the South African TV news was filled with headlines and statistics—100,000 Killed in Rwanda-- Neighbors Slaughter Neighbors with Machetes-- Children Burned Alive in Church-- Boy Forced to Shoot His Mother. Headlines hard to believe, much less comprehend the amount of suffering behind the words.

But I did think again and again of that Rwandan surgeon and his shock and horror when he heard that his President had been assassinated. And I think of him to this day whenever I hear or read the words “genocide” or “Rwanda” or even “machete.” I know, intellectually, that the surgeon’s family may have been lost in the mayhem, as he was most certainly Tutsi, part of the more privileged groups in Rwanda, and at the time it was the Tutsi’s being slaughtered by the Hutus. I’ll never know for sure. I can only hope they survived, as did Deo in the biography. And I hope, to the corners of my soul, that I never have an experience that would allow me to comprehend the depths of his horror.