‘We can forget the past when we are playing’

‘MY father was in a field, building houses, when they killed him,” says Audifax Byiringiro.

The opening batsman of Rwanda’s cricket team is sitting on a bench on a warm evening in Kigali. We are talking about cricket — a net session for Byiringiro’s teammates is taking place metres away, preparation for an International Cricket Council Africa Division Two T20 tournament in South Africa next month.

Yet like so much in Rwanda, the conversation is forever framed by 100 blood-soaked days in 1994, when 800 000 Tutsis were slaughtered by members of the rival Hutu community in one of the most devastating genocides in African history. Byiringiro’s father, an engineer, was one of the victims, as was his eldest brother, who was working alongside him.

“The problems I faced during my childhood were from the consequences of losing a parent during the genocide,” he says. “After that my family struggled a lot — we were six kids with only one mother. I was a kid with no father, so I asked what happened. Where is my father? How was he killed? Where is his body? We never got to know his story.”

The family, like thousands of other Tutsis, fled, the threeyear-old Byiringiro strapped to his mother’s back as they dodged the Hutu paramilitary squads — the Interahamwe — who set up roadblocks and killed any Tutsi they stopped.

“Sometimes my mother would pass me to others in order to help her relax a bit. We were hiding in buildings, or by friends and family who were not in the same situations as us,” Byiringiro recalls.

“When we returned to our house after the killing stopped, my older brother went in first because he was now the head of the family. He had his foot blown off by a grenade left in the house. He was in a coma for many months and had shrapnel in his head. He suffers from many other problems now.”

Byiringiro, 24, is one of the luckier survivors. He has a job in IT and is a symbol of the new, integrated and prosper- ous Rwanda. Cricket is playing its part in the healing process.

Also sitting on the bench in Kigali is Charles Haba, president of the Rwandan Cricket Association, one of the handful of people who brought cricket back to their country when they returned from refugee camps in Uganda.

The sport was barely played in Rwanda before 1994. Haba started it with seven friends; now there are 7 000 players nationwide, 11 senior teams for men, five for women and eight university sides. Haba believes the sport is helping to balm wounds in a country where victims and perpetrators live side by side, and even play in the same teams.

“These guys playing here are all from different backgrounds. Some have been orphaned by the genocide, some lived in child-headed households, others suffer trauma,” he says. “Those are the things we live with in our day-to-day lives in Rwanda.”

Byiringiro is not training tonight — cricket is an amateur pursuit in Rwanda and he must go to work — but waiting to bat is all-rounder Derrick Bayingna.

“For me one of the things that helped me with my social life is cricket,” he says.

“I started cricket in 2007 and it has helped me get involved with many kids having fun. That was the start of being much more united with people. Sometimes we might talk about the past and relive it, but we can forget it when playing cricket.

“When the genocide happened my family were still in Uganda. Most of my family members living here were killed. We do talk about it as players. It is part of us. To not talk about it is impossible. It is our history.” That history is all around us. The national cricket ground is the Kicukiro Oval, based at a secondary school that was one of the most notorious massacre sites. A plaque outside tells the story of the 4 500 Tutsis who fled to the UN compound at the École Technique Officielle school where they thought they would be safe. Interahamwe wielding axes and machetes surrounded the perimeter. The standoff lasted for days. When the UN pulled its troops out, the Hutu killers poured in. More than 2 000 Tutsis were hacked to death on the school fields, others were marched away and shot. Until recently there was residue from bones on the outfield; occasionally, players find skull fragments.

In cricket terms the facilities are shockingly poor. There is no grass pitch in Rwanda. The national team train on a matting wicket laid out over concrete so rutted it is only safe to bowl from one end. One player lost two front teeth when a ball reared up off a length. The team’s quickest bowler, “Tall Eric”, bowls at just over 128km/h, but his run-up is stuttered because he fears tripping over the curled-up matting at one end of the wicket.

This is the bottom rung of the ICC ladder.

There is potential for the game to flourish in countries such as Rwanda, but more central support is needed from a world governing body that recently signed its biggest broadcast deal, worth several billion dollars, and voted for the majority to be kept by the richest nations.

In the meantime, others must plug the gap. A British charity, the Rwanda Cricket Stadium Foundation, has raised funds for a new ground. The first phase of building work will provide an international standard grass pitch, six nets and a dressing room.

The arched pavilion design represents the fall of a bouncing ball, and spectator seating will be carved out of the earth to mimic the terraced farms on the steep Kigali hills that provide a spectacular backdrop.

The national team will be able to play international fixtures at home for the first time, and it is hoped schoolchildren attending courses at the ground will watch the game being played and take it up.

“Our ultimate ambition is reconciliation through sport,” says Alby Shale, who lives in Kigali and is project director of the foundation.

“We know that is not something achievable in a day or a year, but Kinyinya village was the foundation of the project and it is about doing that on a much larger scale.

“Cricket is an amazing medium that brings people together. You can’t do anything in cricket without working together. The bowler works in unison with the wicketkeeper, the batsmen have to discuss taking a run, fielders have to back each other up. That teaches you to collaborate.

“It might sound simple to us, but it is a big thing here. The underbelly here is you have people whose parents were probably killed by other players’ parents and there are people in Kinyinya who were perpetrators living next to victims. In England we struggle to handle characters like Kevin Pietersen. Imagine if one of your teammates’ parents killed your mother.” — © The

Cricket brings people together. You can’t do anything in cricket without collaboration