An African Sermon

Soon they were sliding through a brown landscape, dotted with little towns, under a haze of heat. The old man looked out of the window, drinking his wine furtively. Douglas had a sermon to work on. He took out his notebook and doodled thoughtfully in it, but his eyes kept going over to the black man, who was moving restlessly on the seat. After a while, to make conversation, he asked him, “Do you live in Cape Town?”

“Not yet. I hope to settle there.”

It was a strange answer. The man himself was strange, travelling with his one little suitcase to settle in Cape Town. Douglas asked, “Where do you come from?”

“Excuse me?”

“I take it, from your accent, that you come from somewhere else. What is your country?”

He sighed unhappily. “I am from Rwanda.”

“Ah,” Douglas said. “Yes. Yes. I would like to . . . to see Africa.”

There was an awkward pause, then the old man said suddenly, “Rwanda! That was a bad business, what happened up there!”

A shadow passed over Leonard Sagatwa’s face. It was like a subterranean tremor, quickly stifled, and then he got to his feet. “Excuse me, please,” he said, “I must go to eat,” and he left the compartment.

Douglas was perturbed. He didn’t know what had upset Mr. Sagatwa (which was how he thought of him), but he could see there was a story there. In his training for the ministry he’d been an outstanding counsellor, and he’d been told this was because he was sensitive to people’s stories.