Un Destin Rwandais

Bilingual in French and KinyarwandaFor nearly twenty years, Christophe Calais has been chronicling Angelo’s photographic story: a singular destiny closely tracking the sinuous contours of Rwanda – the theatre of a civil war followed by a genocide against the Tutsi minority from April to July 1994. Although a survivor, Angelo is not a victim of ethnic purification. After seeking refuge in Zaire like hundreds of thousands of other Hutu civilians fearing victor reprisals, the boy was discovered in a mass grave, covered by the bodies of those who had died from a cholera epidemic which had hit the Goma region. After photographing the boy’s return to the world of the living, Christophe Calais continued to follow the child’s journeys on the borders of Zaire and Rwanda.Since 2009, Nathan Réra has been exploring Christophe Calais’ work in the form of an uninterrupted dialogue. Through their words, readers will learn about the ongoing changes in Angelo’s daily life as he enters his teenage years, learns to be an adult, deals with minor daily problems, and assumes the heavy burden placed upon him by his people. His portrait, drawn against the backdrop of a society torn between memory and oblivion, remains that of a Rwandan engaged in a perpetual race for survival.