Eric Eugène Murangwa was face down on the floor of his home being shouted at. “I am a Rayon Sport fan, how can you say you play for them?” roared the soldier. “You’re lying to me and I’m not going to tolerate that. We were going to kill you later but now you have fast-tracked your death.” At that moment some of the other soldiers ransacking Murangwa’s flat happened to toss a photo album into the air. It landed open on a page full of pictures of Murangwa and his team-mates from Rayon Sport. The first soldier studied the surprising new evidence.

“Are you Toto?” he eventually asked Murangwa. Toto, meaning ‘Young One’ in Swahili, was the nickname by which Murangwa was known to fans of Rayon Sport, whom he had joined as a boy before making his first-team debut at 16. “Yes, it’s me,” replied the goalkeeper. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?” the soldier demanded. “But I’ve been saying it for the last half an hour,” spluttered Murangwa. “Wow,” the soldier said, shaking his head incredulously. “So, how are you?”

My journey back to Rwanda: confronting the ghosts of the genocide 21 years later Read more

That is a snippet of an exchange that took place on 7 April 1994, the day hell broke loose in Rwanda. Over the next hundred days about 800,000 people were slaughtered, most of them Tutsis like Murangwa. This month, in a north London function room where he and more than 200 compatriots held their annual celebration of the end of the genocide in Rwanda, Murangwa, a former national team captain, recalled how football saved his life.

The encounter with the soldiers was not the closest he came to being killed, nor the episode that marked him the deepest. What moved him most, and what drives the work that he does now in Britain and Rwanda, was the way several of his team-mates risked their own lives to preserve his. “I started playing sport just because it was fun,” he says. “It was only during the genocide that I realised sport could teach you how to be human.”

Football before the genocide: Rayon shine bright before darkness falls

The architects of the genocide, like the Belgian colonialists before them, knew that football could serve the most sinister purposes. The national team may have been withdrawn from international competition in 1987 because of financial hardship and bad results, but the local club scene was vibrant, attracting huge support, mainly along regional lines. By the late 1980s most of the clubs in the top flight had directors who were high-ranking members of the MRND, the country’s only permitted political party since shortly after Juvénal Habayrimana seized power through a coup in 1973.

But Rayon Sport was a singular club, and also the most popular. Based in Nyanza, the seat of the Rwandan monarchy until its abolition during the violent transition in the early 60s from a Belgian colony in which the rulers stoked ethnic divisions by favouring Tutsi to an independent nation dominated by Hutus, the club drew support from all over the country and enjoyed backing from rich businessmen. “We had that connection to the past,” says Murangwa. “The government disliked us for that.”

Eric Eugène Murangwa with Rayon Sports in 1992.

In 1990 Rwanda was plunged into war when a Tutsi rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), invaded the north from Uganda. As Habayrimana scrambled to hold off the RPF, he also had to contend with increased domestic opposition as well as international pressure to democratise. In 1991, under duress, he introduced multipartyism. In response Hutu extremists began to plot mass extermination, stockpiling guns and machetes and, through the infamous Radio des Milles Collines, venting rabid anti-Tutsi propaganda.

The football championship was suspended when war broke out. But with fighting confined mostly to the north it resumed in 1992, and politicians who had joined clubs to boost their own popularity started to hijack and weaponise fans’ fervour.

Matches against Etincelles, a club in the president’s heartland of Gisenyi, became so hostile that Murangwa refused to play away against them, fearing for his life. And then there was the Interahamwe, the government-backed militia who would become the most sadistic and prolific killers during the genocide. They were formed in late 1991 at a football club – an amateur side in Kigali called Loisirs, for whom one of the Habyrimana’s sons played – and recruited many members from fan groups of bigger clubs. They mimicked football fan culture – their rallies, often in or around stadiums, featured chants, drumming and attire similar to those enjoyed by supporters.

In 1992 one of the top figures in the Interahamwe, Georges Rutaganda, even made a bid for the presidency of Rayon Sport, but failed when caught trying to rig elections. And then, in March 1994, the club provided a moment of respite, a break amid the tension and sporadic violence that was becoming increasingly difficult to bear. Rayon had lost 1-0 in the first leg of their Africa Cup Winners’ Cup meeting with Al Hilal, the Sudanese side that two years previously had reached the final of the tournament that would become the African Champions League.

Rwanda had completely broken apart. But we won and it created an atmosphere of togetherness

In the second leg, in front of a packed Amahoro stadium in Kigali, Rayon eased to a 4-1 win. It was the greatest triumph by a Rwandan team until then and inspired an almighty outpouring of joy and unity.

“That was a game of incredible significance,” says Murangwa. “It happened at a time when Rwanda had completely broken apart. But we won and it created an atmosphere of togetherness. Tutsis and ordinary Hutu who had not been socialising for some time used that opportunity to come together. People spent all night celebrating in pubs and street dancing.”

Even Radio Des Milles Collines, which usually denounced Rayon Sport as an enemy within, congratulated the club for flying the Rwandan flag so high. And the president invited the players to a televised reception in which he basked in the reflection of their glory. “Many of us didn’t want to go but we had no choice,” says Murangwa. As is turned out, one of his team-mates would later owe his life to the fact that he did attend, because several weeks later the midfielder Celestin ‘Tigana’ Gasangwa was spared when he showed a group of Interahamwe fighters who were about to kill him a photo of him shaking hands with president Habyrimana.

Fire grows in the sky, blood drenches the earth

Murangwa remembers exactly where he was when he heard about the event that started mass butchery. He was on his way home from a bar where he had watched a match. Inappropriately enough, that match was the 1994 Africa Cup of Nations semi-final in which Zambia beat Mali, a vital game in one of football’s great feelgood stories, Zambia sweeping into the final less than a year after most of their squad had been killed in a plane crash. That night, as Murangwa and his flat-mate walked along chatting about the Zambian players’ feat, they came across a watchman telling people about another plane disaster, one he had just witnessed.

“He said he heard a big bang and saw fire growing up in the sky,” Murangwa recalls. “But it didn’t mean that much to us, we were in a war zone, we were used to hearing grenades being thrown. What we didn’t know is that was actually the president’s plane that had been shot down.”

Habyarimana died along with everyone else on board his private jet, including the president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira. Within hours of that assassination (for which responsibility has not been conclusively established but Hutu extremists are among the main suspects), the horror began. Soldiers scoured Kigali for enemies of the regime; and the Interahamwe began hunting Tutsis.

“I was woken up by an incredible sound of gunfire and bombs around 3am,” says Murangwa. “This was different, much more than we were used to … we waited several hours until it seemed clear outside. It was then that I started to find out what was happening. I heard from neighbours that some people had already been killed in the neighbourhood. No one was sure why but we did know that these people were not on the government’s side.

“It was not just Tutsis who were seen as being not on the government’s side, there were a number of Hutus who were against the government. As time progressed we started to hear news that such and such a family had been killed. These were ordinary Tutsi people who had nothing to do with politics. That’s when we realised how serious the situation was and knew that this was something to really fear: that it was coming directly to you.”

Eric Eugène Murangwa lines up with his Rwanda team-mates in 1995.

It did not take long for the soldiers to come to Murangwa. “They descended in our neighbourhood around 1pm, going from house to house, killing people. Within minutes a group of soldiers burst into our flat. Five or six of them. They started beating us and told us to lay down on the floor as they went from room to room, throwing things up in the air. They said they were looking for weapons and believed we were part of the enemy.”

Sweet luck intervened. The photo album fell open and Toto was recognised. The soldiers’ attitude changed but only towards Murangwa, who had to convince them that his house-mate, Atahanase, also played for Rayon Sport, just not for the first team. “When that soldier put an end to the mayhem, he told the others to step out of the house but his friends went next door and brought out this family – a woman and her three children. Apparently they wanted to throw a grenade at the family and just blow them up.

“The solider chatted with his colleagues and then asked me if I knew these people. I said: ‘Yes, they are my neighbours, I don’t think they have anything to do with whatever you think they have to do with.’ They were saved. But the issue of the houseboy became impossible to resolve.”

Murangwa and Atahanase had a domestic helper, a lad of about 16 who came from the same northern village as Atahanase. “We explained how we knew him, that he had only started working for us a couple of months before, had been recommended by friends and he didn’t have an ID card because he had just left school. But they didn’t find that convincing. They told us to go back inside. Then we heard a bang.”

Murangwa recounts all this with matter-of-factness; 23 years later, there is warmth in some of his recollections and he even smiles at some of the absurdity he witnessed amid evil. Only occasionally is pain apparent. Such as when he explains that he cannot remember the murdered lad’s name. He had not known him for long, and there has been so much else to absorb since.

No time to sing

Murangwa did not stick around for long after the soldiers moved on. “The next morning we left,” he continues. “I went to my parents’ house, which was about 1.5 miles from there. The initial idea was to find out if they were still alive and then, if they were, we would go to a nearby college that had been housing Tutsi families who had been harassed in other parts of city even before the genocide. When I arrived, everyone was there but very shaken, especially my father, who was old enough to have experienced similar problems [in the early 60s]. He sensed something serious was coming. As we were trying to gather things and head to the college, we heard more shooting in the neighbourhood. My father then said: ‘I would rather stay here and die in my home than on the street.’ He ordered us not to go to the college. My family comes from a very strong Christian background, Seventh Day Adventists … so my mum asked us all to pray and sing. I said: ‘Are you serious? Do you really think this is the time to sing? We’re trying to keep our heads down and now you’re saying we must sing.’ I didn’t feel comfortable so I thought: ‘You know what, I’m going to my team-mates’ house.’” Four of them lived just two doors away.

“Three of them were Hutus and one a Tutsi and we were all very close,” he says. “What my team-mates did for me, and indirectly for family, was the reason I survived the genocide. One of them, Longin Munyurangabo, was the most incredible guy, he basically took charge of my whole case.”

Longin Munyurangabo, a man who refused to be normal

Over the next three or four weeks – counting the days was not a priority – Munyurangabo led the effort to shelter Murangwa, and to parlay for mercy on the few occasions the cover was blown. “He decided he would be the negotiator between me and the militia. He bribed them with money and with football kits that he had bought when we had travelled outside Rwanda.”

As the weeks went by, protecting the goalkeeper grew increasingly difficult. On one occasion a band of Interahamwe fighters found him and insisted on taking him away, but his team-mates won his release thanks to more cajoling and bribery and the help of one of the player’s cousins, a deserting solider.

“He had run away from the battlefield to see his cousin because he was just fed up with the fighting,” explains Murangwa. “He helped rescue me just a few minutes after I was kidnapped. My team-mates paid money as part of the negotiations and the solider influenced the situation because he had a gun, although at the time a soldier didn’t have so much power in front of the militia because the militia were more connected to those who were the real brains behind the genocide. You could be a soldier but if you were not one of the inner circle you didn’t necessarily know what was going on. But most militias knew, because they had been through the training and the propaganda and they knew why they were doing what they were doing.”

Eric Eugène Murangwa instructs children at one of the Dream Team academies he runs in Rwanda. ‘We bring children together around football and teach them to celebrate their diversity,’ he says.

Murangwa knew his luck was unlikely to last. “I remember the soldier saying to me: ‘I may have saved you this time but I’m not going to stay here and guard you throughout – and from what those guys told me, they will come back. The best thing for you to do would be to get out of here.’”

But where could he go? “Longin came up with this idea of going to see one of our important football fans who lived not far away and happened to be one of the leaders of the militia at national level.” He was referring to Jean-Marie Vianney Mudahinyuka, aka Zuzu, an erstwhile official at Rayon Sport and a man who, having been arrested in Chicago in 2004, is serving a life sentence in a Rwandan prison for atrocities committed during the genocide, including the murder of 62 Tutsis in Nyamirambo stadium and the slaughter of 600 Tutsis during an attack on a school.

Murangwa did not know about those crimes back then, but he knew enough to be wary of seeking refuge with Zuzu.

“When Longin mentioned his idea, I said: ‘Are you mad?’” he says. “But he explained that he had met Zuzu a short time after the genocide started and the guy inquired about me, asking: ‘Have you heard about Toto, how is he?’ Longin didn’t give him much because he didn’t know why he was asking. But with our situation as it was, he thought: ‘Maybe this guy actually cares and that’s why he was asking?’

“All the same, we thought we can go and try somewhere else first. So we went to another team-mate, who was Congolese and lived not far away. We thought that maybe because he’s a foreigner, his house may not be a target. My team-mates accompanied me to his house but when we got there he explained he wasn’t going to take me in. Why? Because he had a Tutsi wife and they had been under incredible pressure from the landlord and neighbours who didn’t want her in the compound. We realised there was no other option but to go to Zuzu.

“Again Longin took the matter into his own hands,” continues Murangwa. “He went first to speak to Zuzu and few minutes later there Zuzu was, coming out of his house and smiling and greeting me, saying he was going to protect me ‘until we go and play in Kenya’.”

My team-mates knew my views. They could have been the first to come for me but they chose to be different

Zuzu, it seems, was still thrilled by Rayon Sport’s victory over Al Hilal and thought the bloodletting might finish in time for his team to contest the second round, in which they were to face Kenyan Breweries. “So I spent a couple of days in Zuzu’s house and he eventually helped me to move to the International Red Cross [ICRC] headquarters in downtown Kigali, which is where he left me.”

Unable to get into the compound, Murangwa spent the next few days hiding among trees around its gate and in a nearby alley. He was not alone. “There was another guy there, a man called Jean-Paul who was a driver for the UNDP [United Nations Development Programme],” says Murangwa. “And then we were joined by a couple who had a two-week-old baby.” The ICRC director, a Swiss man called [Philippe] Gaillard, became aware of the baby’s presence and resolved to help. Murangwa, remembering a job that one of his team-mates had, claimed to work part-time for Unicef.

“Apparently the director helped contact the mayor of Kigali to tell him he had two UN officials in his compound and they needed his support to take them to a designated area for UN officials who had been in contact with peacekeepers or the Red Cross … So me and Jean-Paul were taken as two UN workers to the Hôtel des Milles Collines and the couple were taken to St Paul Cathedral.” The hotel would later be made famous by the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda. “The hotel was less than five minutes from where we had been, you could have walked there – except you couldn’t. I stayed in the hotel until the UN peacekeepers negotiated our transfer from there to the RPF-controlled zone at the outskirts of the Kigali. That was my journey of survival.”

Football against the enemy

It was only after the RPF took Kigali and the genocide ended that most people were able to assess the death toll. It turned out that Murangwa’s parents survived. But many other members of his family were less fortunate. All six of his mother’s brothers were killed, and so was his own seven-year-old brother, Jean-Paul Irankunda. The family do not know the precise circumstances of Jean-Paul’s death: it hurts that they do not even have a photograph of him; it also hurts that the last image they saw of him came after the genocide, when a documentary showed footage of Belgian troops evacuating European expatriates during the bloodshed and ignoring the pleas for assistance from a group of Rwandan men, women and children who had been hiding in a nearby church. Jean-Paul can be seen clearly, looking into the camera. Confused. Helpless.

As for Longin Munyurangabo, the team-mate whom Murangwa says did more than anyone to save his life, he too perished. “I was not the only person he was helping,” says Murangwa. “He had a Tutsi girlfriend who he could not take away to a safer house like he managed to do with me. He had to remain with her up until the night before Kigali fell. Then, apparently, the local authorities forced the entire population to leave. In that chaos when they were running away they came to a roadblock that had been put in place by the losing regime’s soldiers, somewhere near the town of Ruhengeri in the north.

“The soldiers were running but still trying to find the enemy so they were checking ID cards. Longin and his girlfriend arrived. The woman was identified as a Tutsi. She had fake ID but they didn’t want to believe it because of her appearance. The soldiers got very angry, not only with the woman but also with Longin, a Hutu man they accused of treachery. They insulted him for protecting the enemy. The woman was stabbed and thrown over the bridge into the river, which swept her away. Miraculously she survived. But Longin was never seen alive again.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eric Eugène Murangwa at a Holocaust Memorial Day commemorative event in London in January 2017. Photograph: David Parry/PA

He is one of more than 70 footballers, coaches and club officials commemorated in a genocide memorial erected by the Rwandan Football Federation. Many of those victims were slain by their own team-mates. “The genocide was very intimate, you were more in danger from people who knew you than from strangers,” explains Murangwa, who, nevertheless, believes that the notion of a football family is not quite as hollow as some of the other fine words that were exposed as worthless during the genocide.

“My team-mates were the guys who knew my views – we had spent time discussing politics. They could have been the first to come for me, as was the case for many other people. But they chose to be different. They refused to be normal when being normal meant being a crazy murderer. That attitude contributed to how I later chose to live my life. I chose to make sure my past does not hold me back, I want to create a legacy that will show my children and their children that what my team-mates did for me is what we should all live for.”

Coming to Britain, building a better world

Before Murangwa could begin building his legacy in earnest, the past did threaten to hold him back, even though after the genocide he made his debut for, and captained, Amavubi (the Wasps), as the Rwanda national team are known. “Rwanda was suffering from an insurgency,” he explains. “Many militia members who had fled to Congo when the RPF took over tried to come back and launch attacks. Among those caught were two of the three who had kidnapped me during the genocide. They were targeting survivors. What really shook me is that during questioning they mentioned me by name. Knowing that there could be people secretly hunting me, rather than doing so openly, somehow made me feel even more uncomfortable than during the genocide.”

In June 1996, during a stopover in Paris on the way back from a World Cup qualifier in Tunisia, Murangwa fled. Unwilling to stay in France, he headed first to Belgium and then to Britain, where he was granted asylum. Since then, based in London, he has been working to spread understanding and togetherness. He is an increasingly busy man.

For years one of the organisations he created, Football for Hope, Peace and Unity, has been using football to advance reconciliation in Rwanda.

He also runs Dream Team academies in the country in the pursuit of similar goals. “We bring children together around football and teach them to celebrate their diversity, as well as give them messages about conflict resolution, heath and female empowerment.”

He works to educate young people in Britain, too. Through the organisation he set up in November 2015, Survivors Tribune, he and others who have endured genocides around the world give talks in schools, colleges and universities. “We use our experiences to confront issues of hate, discrimination and artificial social divisions. We can show how easy they are to spread but also our stories can create change and empower people to resist them. During the genocide I saw how horrible humans can be, but I also knew a few who gave me hope.

“It is great if football can produce more Ronaldos and Messis. But what would help the world most is to have more Longins.”