Rusesabagina Quotes

It’s dark. It’s cold. You should be in the warm comfort of your hut, sitting next to your mom and 3 older sisters, preparing dinner. Your dad should be outside, laughing loudly with the village elders while drinking banana beer. But instead, you’re outside, no shelter, no food. The Hutus have killed your mother and father, and captured your older sisters- only to have them soon follow the same destiny as your parents. To you, the hutus are the reason all of this has happened. It’s not you’re fault you’re a Tutis. Up until now you loved who were you were; but now, you’re questioning everything. If you were a Tutsis living in 1994 Rwanda, there is a very strong chance that you or someone you loved was going to be slaughtered by a Hutu. But if you
In the middle of the book, Rusesabagina talks about how hurtful it is when someone called him a muzungu, the Kinyarwandan word for white man. When he was younger, he and his friends would call strange european men that. They did not mean it as an offensive term, only as a way to identify the strange man. But being called that as an adult hurt Rusesabagina. However being called a muzungu as an adult was the same as being called an Uncle Tom, or a black(ish) man that will do anything to get in the good graces of a white man. It hurt Rusesabagina because to his co-workers he was viewed as different- and that hurt his confidence and soul. Another huge piece of evidence towards the “importance of words” theme is RTLM. RTLM was a radio station that influenced 1,000,000’s of listeners. Every broadcast seemed to include a slam or a hatred towards some tutsi. But people did not stop listening; people COULD not stop listening. RTLM had a captive audience, one that was to awestruck to turn away from the horrible news. The specific words used in the book had a huge impact- both personally to the author, and to the 1,000,000’s of witnesses to the Rwandan