The Convoy

Prize-winning novelist and short-story writer Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s harrowing, urgent memoir documents and reconstructs her escape, at the age of fifteen, from the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

The author was fifteen at the height of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. She and her mother had spent weeks moving from one insecure shelter to another, constantly threatened, always hungry, surrounded by scenes of petrifying violence. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsi were killed in a period of only three months. The violence that the author had no choice but to observe was of an appalling savagery. The victims were killed with machetes and knives and beaten to death with sticks. Many were raped. Dead bodies were everywhere, sometimes in heaps.

The lives of Mairesse and her mother were a sleepless nightmare with no prospect of salvation – until by a miracle, through the bewildering courage of nuns, of aid workers, all of whom every day risked their lives to care for Tutsi fugitives, eventually a place was found for them on a convoy to safety. But the threat and the terror were not yet over. When the journey in the bottom of a truck came at last to an end, their safety was only assured by the presence of journalists and cameramen watching their arrival at the frontier.

More than a decade later, after rebuilding her life in France, Mairesse is ready to begin the process of reconstructing her incomplete memories of the escape and building community with other survivors. She has become a prize-winning novelist, but never until now has she written on her own history. Beginning with the BBC team which filmed the convoy, then by tracking down aid workers, journalists and fellow escapees and scouring archives in a search for photographs of her own crossing of the border, Mairesse pieces together records and personal accounts to elucidate the chaos that overtook Rwanda at the time of the genocide.

‘A moving and powerful account of the violence of the genocide in Rwanda and of the aftermath for the survivors. Its descriptions of the terror of the days in hiding are unforgettable.’ – Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

‘A superb act of defiance and an unexpected gift to the world. It reclaims the right to individualise the genocide against the Tutsi and offers a powerful alternative to resilience stories.’ – Olivette Otele, author of African Europeans: An Untold History

‘The Convoy is a genocide survivor’s determined quest to find out more details about her past. But in Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s gifted hands, this moving and profound book expands to become a meditation on what it means to remember and what we can still salvage from all those things that remain unknown. The Convoy is a deeply intimate story and a generous, capacious examination of survival and healing. It is an affirmation of love’s ability to forge new paths across terrain that hatred and violence once tried to destroy. This is a necessary book for our times.’ – Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, finalist for the Booker Prize

‘The Convoy is a literary detective novel which, as Seamus Heaney would say, allows hope and history to rhyme. Told in clear, concise prose, this is a brave story that comes at a perfect time, and allows us to know that nothing ever truly ends.’ – Colum McCann