Road to Rwanda
By Sorious Samura
BBC World Service
First broadcast Monday, March 22 at 8.05pm
3/5
Vestine - returning home after 16 years
Award winning Sierra Leonean documentary maker Sorious Samura follows, Vestine, a Hutu refugee as she returns home to Rwanda 16-years after the genocide.
He wanted to try and understand what it is like to return to a country from the Democratic Republic of Congo after the terrible events of 1994.
Vestine was 16 when she fled with her family. Some, including her father, died and she did not know where the others were. She said: “I didn’t know where my mother had gone.
“That’s when a Congolese man abducted me. Soon after I got pregnant with my first daughter,” – she had four others by him.
Samura describes many of the problems which contributed to the killings which claimed the lives of 5.4 million people in Rwanda, why the Congolese are so resentful about the refugees in their country and the issues when the refugees return despite their obvious excitement about it.
Fortunately for Vestine, some of her family members had already returned to her village and she was welcomed back – but it will not always be the same for Rwandans coming back.
Tensions in the African country are still evident as Hutus return to live alongside the very people who killed their parents, brothers, sisters and children years before.
The 25-minute documentary deals with a very delicate subject well, and offers a very personal insight to a conflict which was all too often concerned with hundreds-of-thousands at a time.
