Host a Book Club

Land of a Thousand Hills: My Life in Rwanda
A great way to learn more about Roz Carr’s life in Rwanda is to read her memoir, Land of a Thousand Hills: My Life in Rwanda.  Enjoy learning about Rwanda pre-and post-independence from the perspective of a woman who lived there for more than five decades.

Described as a latter-day Out of Africa, the memoir recalls the author’s fifty years in the continent’s most beautiful and most tormented nation.

When Roz first arrived in Africa in 1949, she didn’t realize she would spend the rest of her life there.  As a young fashion illustrator living in New York City in the 1940s, she seemed the least likely candidate for a life of such adventure.  But marriage to a British big game hunter and explorer took her to what was then the Belgian Congo; and their eventual divorce left her determined to stay on, in neighboring Rwanda, as owner of a pyrethrum plantation.

In the ensuing half-century, she witnessed the decline and fall of colonialism in Africa, the wars for independence, the loss of her friend Dian Fossey, and the relentless clashes between the Tutsis and the Hutus.  And finally, 1994’s horrific genocide, of which she provides a personal, first-hand account that is unparalleled, and underscores her continued devotion to the country by her decision to stay and care for more than four hundred of its orphaned children.

Land of a Thousand Hills unfolds against the backdrop of Rwanda’s history from the royal Tutsi dynasty to the present, a landscape whose magic is aptly evoked.  It is the epic story of a woman alone in an exotic land, struggling to survive untold hardships, only to emerge with an extraordinary love for her adopted country and its people.