A GOOD MAN IN RWANDA. Pt. 4

And I got to know Mbaye a little myself. Soldiers are normally wary of journalists, but, in this, as in other ways, he was different.

One day, we drove together in his white UN car to gather information about an orphanage in a suburb of the city called Nyamirambo, where it was believed several hundred vulnerable children might be hiding.

On our way there, we were stopped at a militia roadblock. One of the militiamen walked over to the car and leaned through the window holding a Chinese stick grenade. It looked like an old-fashioned sink plunger, but instead of having a rubber sucker on the end of a stout stick, it had a bomb.

He waved it at me.

“Who’s this Belgian?” he asked menacingly.

The militia considered Belgians, the former colonial power in Rwanda, to be their enemy. They had recently killed 10 Belgian soldiers, who were part of the UN force, calculating that this would make the entire Belgian UN contingent leave Rwanda – which it did.

I was terrified I was about to be killed, but Mbaye looked at the man, smiled, and cracked a joke.

“I’m the only Belgian in this car. See?” he said, pinching some of the jet-black Senegalese skin on his arm. “Black Belgian!”

The joke broke the tension of the moment. Mbaye then ordered him out of the way, the militiaman instinctively obeyed - and we drove on.

“He loved joking with people, he loved talking,” says one of his former comrades in the UN mission, Babacar Faye, now a colonel in the Senegalese army.

He used his sense of humour to talk his way through the roadblocks.”

Mbaye was a devout Muslim, but he carried alcohol in his UN 4x4 to buy the lives of people he was taking through the deadly checkpoints.

“In his car, he would often have cases of beer, bottles of whisky and lots of packets of cigarettes,” says Faye. “And he always had wads of cash.”

I once saw a list of names on a scrap of paper that had fallen out of his pocket. It was a list of first names –“Pierre”, “Marie’ - with sums of money written next to them - $10, $30 and so on.

These were his records – the amounts he had paid, often on someone else’s behalf, to get people through the checkpoints.

He sometimes even gave away his military food rations – and when his colleagues found out, they donated theirs to add to the valuable stash on the back seat of his car.

“When he was stopped at these roadblocks, the militiamen would say ‘Boss, I’m hungry’ or ‘Boss I’m thirsty’ so he’d give them a cigarette, or if it was one of the militia chiefs he’d give a beer or a whisky,” says Faye.

“This allowed him to go everywhere without making the militiamen too angry. And that’s how he saved people the militia wanted to kill – five or six people in his car at a time.”