BOOKS AND AUTHORS: Africa Love Story
.c The Associated Press
By SUSAN LINNEE
GISENYI, Rwanda (AP) - Love brought Rosamund Halsey Carr to the heart of
Africa half a century ago, and it is love that now holds her in this
breathlessly beautiful place that is as volatile as the simmering volcano
that looms nearby.
What anchors her is the love she has for the children whose parents were
hacked and shot to death in Rwanda's killing frenzy.
``This country that I love has given me much. Its people are my strength, and
its children my greatest joy,'' Carr writes in the prologue to ``Land of a
Thousand Hills: My Life in Rwanda,'' her ode to the tiny central African
nation whose name most often conjures up the awesome death and destruction of
the 1994 genocide in which at least half a million people were slaughtered on
the orders of an extremist government.
Carr, an elegant, energetic 87, first arrived in Rwanda from New York City in
1949, a newspaper fashion illustrator hoping to shore up her seven-year
marriage to English explorer and big game hunter Kenneth Carr, a man many
years her senior who had enthralled her with his stories of Africa.
The marriage didn't survive, but 52 years later, Carr is knee-deep in
children, orphans of both the minority Tutsis and majority Hutus who died
since the genocide was unleashed on April 7, 1994.
``I wanted it to be a sort of love story,'' she says. ``But the fact that
there is no reconciliation in sight here is heartbreaking to me. ... There
has to be reconciliation in this country for the people who lost everybody.''
Carr was among the foreign nationals evacuated from Rwanda four days after
the genocide began. In August 1994, she was one of the first to return - to
her beloved home in Mugongo, 12 miles northwest of Gisenyi in the foothills
of the Virguna mountains where she first grew pyrethrum, a flower that
produces a natural insecticide, and later raised flowers for export.
In 1997, Hutu rebel attacks in northwestern Rwanda again forced Carr, the
last of the foreign plantation owners in the country, to leave Mugongo, but
this time she also had Imbabazi, the orphanage she and her longtime helper
and colleague, Sembagare, set up in a shed she had used for drying flowers.
The orphanage has since found temporary quarters in Gisenyi.
She is desperate to return to her stone cottage in Mugongo that has been
sacked and burned several times by rebels and government soldiers, but
everyone says it would be mad to take the 100 children with her.
Hutu militiamen known as Interahamwe carried out much of the orgy of killing
that took place over 100 days in 1994. When Tutsi rebels overthrew the
extremist Hutu government responsible for the genocide, the militiamen fled
west into the then-Zaire. Tens of thousands remain in today's Congo, many now
in the Congolese army. Their presence is a gnawing threat to Rwanda and a key
ingredient in the region's volatility.
Imbabazi, which is still looking for a permanent home, has 20 longtime
supporters, including the primate section of the zoo in Columbus, Ohio, which
Carr first knew when it funded research on the mountain gorillas that live in
the foothills above her farm.
``After the genocide, they were ashamed to send money to gorillas, not
people,'' she says over lunch in her temporary home in Gisenyi on a boulevard
of faded elegance that runs along Lake Kivu.
Nearly all those who have written about Rwanda since 1994 - and their numbers
keep growing - have approached it as a case study, attempting to decipher how
one part of a society could turn on another with such fury. Many of the
authors had never heard of Rwanda before the genocide, and few had set foot
there.
Carr's story, published by Viking, is about the long-term love affair between
a woman and a country. But it is also a fascinating, forthright historical
account told by one who lived it, with an eye for nuance and detail.
It might never have happened had it not been for her niece, Ann Halsey, who
vaguely remembered Carr's departure for Africa when she was a little girl.
Forty years later, she traveled to Rwanda in 1989 for the first time, and as
she got to know ``Roz,'' she knew her aunt had to write her story.
``By the time the orphanage opened, everything was upside down in her life,
and it was obvious she was never going to have time to sit down and do
this,'' says Halsey, who quit her job and became her aunt's Boswell. ``She
never dreamed in a million years the book would be published, but she gave me
free rein to go and do it.''
Years ago, Carr had tried writing about Rwanda. She had a story published in
the Saturday Evening Post in 1952, but Coronet rejected another one about
elephants, arguing that it had ``no dramatic ending.''
People would repeatedly ask Carr why she liked living in Rwanda and why she
stayed. Now that the names of Congo and Rwanda usually signify only death and
destruction, it's often hard to explain.
The region was - and still is - incredibly beautiful and fertile, blessed
with rich volcanic soil, generous rainfall and a temperate climate. A band of
minor European nobility had ended up in the area in the 1940s and '50s on
large plantations growing pyrethrum or raising cattle. They hunted, loved,
raised children and held elegant dinner parties - and didn't know what hit
them when the Congo gained independence in 1960, and they were forced to flee.
Those were the days when Mademoiselle de Gallberg, a Russian orphan adopted
by a French marquis, fell in love with a Belgian marquis who built the house
in which Carr now lives, back when Gisenyi was the keystone in what the
Belgians hoped would be a major tourist destination centered on the volcanic
lakes that form the western edge of the Great Rift Valley.
Carr was fortunate to be living in the Belgian trust territory of
Ruanda-Urundi, which gained independence in 1962 as Rwanda and Burundi.
Despite a great social upheaval that resulted in the mass expulsion of the
Tutsis, sowing the seeds for future disaster, the few foreigners living in
Rwanda went about their business unmolested.
Her plans to return to Mugongo on hold, Carr is now in the process of moving
her 100 children plus 22 staff and their families to new, 17-room quarters
for Imbabazi, whose name means ``the generous one'' in the national language,
Kinyarwanda.
In her spare time, she is active in the Unity Club, an organization of the
wives of Rwandan government officials, diplomats and other women working for
reconciliation between Hutus and Tutsis.
In the evening, when she returns from work at the orphanage, which needs
paint, fencing, latrines and a kitchen, the sky over Lake Kivu glows with the
last traces of the setting sun. She surveys the scene from her garden and
considers herself one of the happiest women in the world.
AP-NY-07-12-00 1210EDT
Copyright 2000 The Associated Press.
Pat Noble
always interested in your carrs. don't forget to visit:
<A
HREF="http://worldconnect.genealogy.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=...
My Carr Database at </A><A
HREF="http://worldconnect.genealogy.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=...
RootsWeb's WorldConnect Project </A>
http://worldconnect.genealogy.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=pnoble66