In this documentary for BBC World Service, Mark Doyle tells the story of one of the unsung heroes of Rwanda’s genocide, Mbaye Diagne.                                                                                                                         

On 7 April 1994 this Senegalese captain, working with the UN’s peacekeeping mission in Kigali, helped save the lives of five children. They were the children of Rwanda’s moderate Hutu Prime Minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, who had just been murdered by Hutu extremists.

Mbaye Diagne was to carry out many further acts of heroism during the genocide, which claimed the lives of well over half a million people, mainly ethnic Tutsis. Most were bludgeoned and hacked to death with clubs and machetes at the behest of the Hutu government that had just taken power.

A larger than life character with a ready smile, Mbaye Diagne had a knack of humouring the Hutu militia at checkpoints. He saved hundreds of lives and did so at great personal risk. Time and again he smuggled scores of Tutsis and moderate Hutus to the relative safety of the Hotel des Mille Collines in the centre of Kigali.

Mark Doyle got to know Mbaye Diagne when he was reporting on the genocide for the BBC and even credits him with saving his own life at a checkpoint when he was threatened by a militiaman armed with a grenade.

In A Good Man In Rwanda, Doyle travels to Rwanda, Senegal and Canada to meet the people who knew Mbaye Diagne. He meets the man who commanded the UN peace-keeping force, General Romeo Dallaire; he meets his wife and one of closest comrades in arms and he meets the people whose lives he saved - some of whom have never told their stories before.

"I saw evil in Rwanda in 1994," says Mark Doyle, "but I also saw extraordinary acts of courage by people who simply knew what was right and what was wrong. Mbaye Diagne was just such a person – a good man in Rwanda." Watch excerpts of the documentary here.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01wgcfl