Kigali, Rwanda is the fictional autobiography of a young American diplomat named Derek Johnston who, in the eerie calm of pre-civil war Rwanda in the early 1980s, learns that he has contracted a new and relatively unknown virus originating in central Africa, then called HTLV. Derek has always lived for his sometimes secretive and always tempestuous relations with women; in Kigali, he contracts the disease from prostitutes as his love affair with the niece of a local planter unravels. Writing at night, Derek remembers his ...
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Kigali, Rwanda is the fictional autobiography of a young American diplomat named Derek Johnston who, in the eerie calm of pre-civil war Rwanda in the early 1980s, learns that he has contracted a new and relatively unknown virus originating in central Africa, then called HTLV. Derek has always lived for his sometimes secretive and always tempestuous relations with women; in Kigali, he contracts the disease from prostitutes as his love affair with the niece of a local planter unravels. Writing at night, Derek remembers his childhood in Paris, his high school years in Illinois, his time as a photographer in New York, his passage through Munich, and the women who have brought him to where he is. Struggling to understand the people and events of his distant and recent past, he both discovers and imposes meaning, as all of us are destined to do. Kigali, Rwanda, is a haunting meditation on life, death, sex, physicality, exile, and loss.
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