Outside of clan Kagame's centuries-old family compound in the City of Butare, the Rwandan sun blazed hotly, heating up the eastern African countryside like a furnace. After spending four long and eventful years studying civil engineering at Carleton University in the City of Ottawa, Ontario, Patrick Kagame had nearly forgotten how hot his birthplace of Butare could be. The very air in metropolitan Butare felt like the surface of the sun...
Sweating profusely, Patrick briefly wished he were still in the City of Ottawa. Those Canadian winters had a way of giving a man from the tropics the blues, in more ways than one. Somehow, though, Patrick, hailing from one of the world's hottest countries, the Republic of Rwanda, adapted to the Ontario winters. To the point that he joined the Alpine Skiing Club at school, becoming the first black student to do so in the club's decades-long history at Carleton University. Patrick surprised himself and others as he took to alpine skiing like a cat takes to hunting mice.
Three days after he landed at the Kigali International Airport, Patrick Kagame was still getting used to the heat. The young man was relieved to see his hometown in good shape, and had the house to himself since his parents Jacques and Marie Kagame were visiting relatives in the City of Kigali. Patrick was indeed glad to be home.
Oh, Patrick definitely missed his friends and colleagues in the Canadian Capital, just like he missed his old lab in the Minto Center at Carleton University. For over four years, Ottawa was his home and Carleton University was his domain. Still, he graduated and had to move on. Such was life. He was glad to be home, but felt like there was something missing. Lucky for Patrick, an old friend came by to give him one hell of a homecoming present.
"Hot damn it, Khadija, I've missed you so much," Patrick Kagame whispered, smiling as he beheld his beloved Khadija Elmi in all of her glory. The six-foot-tall, statuesque and very voluptuous Somali woman looked absolutely stunning, her dark brown glistening in the late afternoon sunlight as she leaned against the balcony, without a care in the world. Inside his house in the town of Butare, Rwanda, away from prying eyes, they were together at last.
To say that Patrick Kagame, a practicing Catholic and the eldest son of a proud Tutsi family and Khadija Ismail, the eldest daughter of a Somali Muslim family, came from different worlds would have been the understatement of the century. In Rwanda, a beautiful and complex nation still healing from the legacy of the Tutsi/Hutu genocide, the Somalis were something of a cypher.
With their Islamic faith and bad reputation, the Somalis of Rwanda often felt persecuted regardless of who was in power. Both Tutsis and Hutus hated Somali-Rwandans with a passion. Nevertheless, from early on, Patrick and Khadija, who lived in the same neighborhood in western Butare, struck a friendship that endured. Patrick still remembered how desperately Khadija clung to him the day he revealed to her that his parents were sending him to study in Canada.
"Don't forget me, Patrick, and don't marry one of these white women either," Khadija said, hugging Patrick fiercely, and he smiled and nodded at her, then swore to high heaven that he would never forget her. Fast forward four years and a twenty-two-year-old Patrick Kagame was back in Rwanda with his fancy engineering degree from a Canadian university. The tall, mahogany-hued and scrawny youth that Khadija remembered had morphed into a brawny, handsome young man.
