Rwanda (August 1964 to July 1965)

Fed up with McGill after second year, I met Father Georges-Henri Levesque at a party and he said “come teach at the University of Rwanda” which he had founded a year earlier. After asking this remarkably charismatic fellow where was Rwanda, I agreed. I was 19 and it changed my life.

We were 86 students and 29 staff in the second year of the University of Rwanda’s existence, distributed among four faculties: Arts, Social Sciences, Science, and Medicine. In 2026 there were 35,000.I thought I was going to teach Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Hemingway, but as 90% of the books were in English (donated by USAID), I ended up teaching very practical reading, writing and speaking in all faculties. They were brilliant students. By the end of the year my eight Arts students were debating in English, according to Oxford Union Rules.

The University was housed in a former, Belgian, colonial-era, girls boarding school

In the Spring of 1965, my father extended a European business trip with a visit to me at the University. We picked him up in Uganda and drove across the equator to Butare in southern Rwanda.

Travels with pals in Central Africa