During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Paul Rusesabagina sheltered hundreds of refugees at the Hôtel des Mille Collines in Kigali, and is credited with ultimately saving more than 1,200 people.
Flickr/Gerald R. Ford School of Public PolicyPaul Rusesabagina in 2014.
In 1994, the small African nation of Rwanda collapsed into one of the most horrific genocides of the 20th century. Over just 100 days, an estimated 800,000 of the minority Tutsi people were slaughtered by extremist Hutu militias. And as the genocide spread, a hotelier named Paul Rusesabagina found himself at the center of this sectarian violence.
A hotel manager in Kigali, Rusesabagina took action during the genocide by sheltering as many terrified people as he could at the Hôtel des Mille Collines. His courageous act was dramatized in the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda, and Rusesabagina ultimately saved the lives of more than 1,200 people.
This is the incredible true story of Paul Rusesabagina, the brave hotelier from Hotel Rwanda.
The Early Life Of Paul Rusesabagina
Born on June 15, 1954, in Kigali, Rwanda, Paul Rusesabagina was raised by a Hutu father and a Tutsi mother. Despite the tensions that later erupted between the two groups, they had lived side-by-side in peace for centuries. According to Der Spiegel, it was colonizers like the Germans and the Belgians who had encouraged conflict between the two ethnic groups.
But that came later. Rusesabagina, one of nine children, grew up in a poor but stable family. As he recalled in his 2007 autobiography An Ordinary Man: The True Story Behind Hotel Rwanda, he and his siblings grew up “without shoes” in a house “made of mud and sticks.”
“Our family had rows of sorghum and bananas planted on the slopes of two hills, which made us solidly middle class by the standards of rural Africa in the 1950s,” he recounted. “We would have been considered quite poor, of course, when viewed through the lens of a European nation, but it was all we knew and there was always plenty to eat.”
US Embassy Sweden/FlickrAfter considering becoming a minister, Paul Rusesabagina ultimately entered a career in hospitality.
Rusesabagina went to school at the Seventh Day Adventist College of Gitwe, and became fluent in English and French, as well as his native Kinyarwanda. He initially wanted to become a minister, but became more interested in the hospitality industry. And after enrolling in a hotel management program, Rusesabagina was hired at the Hôtel des Mille Collines.
Along the way, Rusesabagina also married and had three children. He and his first wife legally separated in 1981, and in 1989 Rusesabagina married his second wife, Tatiana Mukangamije, after meeting her at a wedding.
Things seemed to be falling into place for Paul Rusesabagina. But everything changed in the spring of 1994.
How The Rwandan Genocide Began In April 1994
At the same time that Paul Rusesabagina was making strides in his career and personal life, civil unrest had intensified across Rwanda. There had been terrible violence between the majority Hutu group and the minority Tutsi group before, but things escalated dramatically in April 1994, when a plane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down over Kigali.
To this day, it’s unknown who shot down the president’s plane. But the consequence of the act was chillingly clear. Habyarimana had been an ethnic Hutu, and Hutu extremist used his death to attack the minority Tutsi people
Wikimedia CommonsPresident Habyarimana died on April 6, 1994.
Hutus roamed the country, armed with machetes and rifles. They raped Tutsi women, maimed and murdered Tutsi men, and attacked Hutu moderates. Tutsis fled to churches and community centers, where they were often murdered en masse, and United Nations forces in the country commanded by Roméo Dallaire were powerless to stop the violence.
The Rwandan genocide had begun.
As Paul Rusesabagina wrote, the violence spread with terrifying speed across the country. On the first night of the genocide, streetlights in Kigali were cut out, and Hutu forces quickly set up checkpoints across the city.
“Eventually, the roadblocks would be made of human corpses,” he wrote. “Every carload of people that came by was subject to a search and a check of those identity papers that listed ethnicity. Those who were found to be Tutsis were dragged to one side and chopped apart with machetes.”
Scott Peterson/Liaison/Getty Images
Victims of the Rwandan genocide. May 25, 1994.
And for Rusesabagina, the violence was personal. His wife was a Tutsi.
The True Story Of ‘Hotel Rwanda’
On the day the Rwandan genocide began, Paul Rusesabagina brought his family to the Hôtel des Mille Collines for safety. Around them, Kigali had erupted into terrible violence, as Rusesabagina recalled in his autobiography.
Adam Jones, Ph.D./Wikimedia CommonsThe Hôtel des Mille Collines, where Paul Rusesabagina sheltered hundreds of refugees.
“Doctors were pulled out of their homes and shot in the head,” he wrote. “Old women were stabbed in the throat. Schoolchildren were hit on the head with wooden planks and their skulls cracked open on the concrete with the blow of a boot heel. The elderly were thrown down the waste holes of outhouses.”
The next day, hundreds of Tutsis and moderate Hutus converged at the 113-room hotel, seeking shelter. According to The Guardian, many hoped that the presence of white foreigners might protect them. But within days, the foreigners were evacuated. The Rwandans, on the other hand, were trapped.
As mobs roamed the streets, the hotel became a refuge. And Rusesabagina did whatever he could to protect the hundreds of people trapped inside. He bribed the Hutu generals with alcohol, used his international connections to deter the Hutu extremists from attacking, and provided meals of beans and rice for the terrified refugees sheltering within the hotel.
“What Paul did was extraordinary,” refugee Thomas Kamilindi, a radio journalist who sheltered at the hotel during the Rwandan genocide, told The Guardian. “He gave us the hotel for free. When the water in the pool ran out, he sent a lorry to get more water, I don’t know where from. Each time they menaced the hotel, he called the army officers, he opened the cellars and he distributed the wine and the champagne.”
ALEXANDER JOE/AFP/Getty Images
Rwandan refugees. May 1994.
Indeed, Paul Rusesabagina ultimately saved 1,268 Hutu and Tutsi refugees by keeping the violence outside the hotel at bay for 11 weeks. But not everyone was so lucky. By the time the Rwandan genocide ended 100 days after it had begun, some 800,000 people had been murdered by Hutu extremists.
According to survivors, Rusesabagina’s calm demeanor, quick thinking, and courage kept everyone inside safe. While Hollywood would later dramatize certain aspects of Rusesabagina’s actions, many testimonials confirmed that the hotelier kept the extremist killers from entering.
But the movie was inaccurate in other ways. And it didn’t cover what happened to Paul Rusesabagina in the genocide’s aftermath.
Paul Rusesabagina After The Rwandan Genocide
At the end of Hotel Rwanda, Paul Rusesabagina and his wife are evacuated, and find their way to safety in a well-run refugee camp in Kabuga. In real life, Rusesabagina called the refugee camp a “looting zone” where he had to “forage for food” and where “weeping filled the air.”
He and his family moved as refugees to Belgium in 1996, where Rusesabagina worked as a taxi driver, and they later settled in Texas. His story was more or less unknown around the world until 2004, when the film Hotel Rwanda was released. Starring Don Cheadle, it told a dramaticized, but fairly accurate, account of his actions during the genocide.
Rusesabagina went on to become a public advocate for peace, participating in humanitarian efforts and speaking often at universities and conferences. In 2005, he also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from then-President George W. Bush. But Rusesabagina faced challenges too.
Lionsgate FilmsDon Cheadle as Rusesabagina in Hotel Rwanda.
In 2020, Rusesabagina was kidnapped by the Rwandan authorities and put on trial for his alleged ties to an armed group known as the Forces for National Liberation. Rusesabagina was found guilty of terrorism and sentenced to 25 years in prison, but his sentence was commuted in 2023 after Rwanda was pressured by the United States and Qatar.
Rusesabagina then returned to Texas, where he lives a quiet life. But those who were saved by him back in 1994 have never forgot him.
“Nobody had been killed, injured, beaten, tortured, expelled or retrieved from the hotel during the whole time we were refugees,” Kamilindi, the radio journalist, stated in a 2,000-word testimonial recorded in 2005. “Paul Rusesabagina managed to do the impossible to save our lives at the moment when others were massacring their own children, their own wives.”
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