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At home in Sweden and Rwanda It took Eric Mirindi Dusenge just three months to finish writing his doctoral thesis. Why? Because he was in a hurry to start the postdoctoral European Union’s Marie Curie scholarship he had just received. That meant returning to the University of Gothenburg and to tree plantings in Rwanda. IT IS AN EARLY Sunday morning in Huye, a town in
southwestern Rwanda where one of the University of Rwanda’s campuses is located. We have breakfast on the veranda of one of the hotel rooms: omelette, toast and a plate of banana, watermelon and pineapple. It was in Huye that Eric Mirindi Dusenge was an undergraduate student in the mid-2000s and here is also one of his favourite places in Rwanda: the arboretum where, as a student, he collected plant specimens and spent his time running and meditating. Now he is back as a postdoctoral fellow and involved in a project about how tropical plants absorb and emit carbon dioxide, a surprisingly unexplored area. The project is headed by Göran Wallin and Johan Uddling at the University of Gothenburg. But when Eric tells me about his background, he starts in Kigali where he grew up. A lot of what he has to say is difficult to take in on a quiet Sunday morning. The worst thing, understandably, is the 1994 genocide, a tragedy that represents a sort of ground zero for Rwanda’s contemporary development. It began on April 7, lasted for a hundred days, and resulted in about one million deaths, mainly Tutsis but also moderate Hutus. The UN was later criticized for its inaction, despite having knowledge of what was going on. – I was eight years old, the oldest of five siblings, and of course did not understand much about the events. But during the three months of the genocide, we did not dare leave our house. It was only at night that our parents snuck away to try to find food. In the end, we
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GUJOURNAL MARCH 2020
