Andrew Crofts / Hyppolite Ntigurirwa
This is the shocking and inspirational memoir of a boy who survived the genocide against the Tutsi. When he was seven years old Hyppolite lost many members of his extended family and witnessed the murder of his beloved father. Born in a mud hut without shoes, water or power and often hungry, he struggled after the genocide to gain an education and to learn to forgive the killers. By the age of thirty he had graduated from university in Rwanda and worked as a journalist and radio presenter, a playwright and a theatre director. He raised enough money to travel to England and achieved a Masters Degree in Sociology from Bristol University. He started a Foundation for Peace in Rwanda and travelled to America to deliver a series of lectures at universities along the East Coast of America, including Harvard, using theatre to address issues of hatred and racism being transmitted from one generation to the next, looking from the perspective of a genocide survivor, who was also a sociologist and an artist, at how we influence people’s attitudes to change. In 2019, Hyppolite became an international news item when he performed a hundred-day walk across 1,500 kilometres of Rwanda to mark the 25th anniversary of the genocide, inviting people to join him and to share their stories of peace and forgiveness.
