Roz Remembered by the World

The word of Roz passing away has now spread around the world. She is receiving her due press for living an incredible life of servanthood. Articles have now been published all over Africa and the world like the Rwanda Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Post, Newark Star Ledger, and this coming weekend I hear a story will appear in the NY Times. The following is a great article that appeared in the U.K.'s Telegraph.

Rosamund Carr, who died on September 29 aged 94, abandoned her life as a Manhattan socialite and moved to Central Africa with her adventurer husband; she remained there for more than 50 years and chronicled her experiences of the beauties and tragedies of the region in Land of a Thousand Hills — My Life in Rwanda (1999).

The eldest of three children of a New York bond trader, she was born Rosamund Halsey at South Orange, New Jersey, in 1912. Her early life was one of "boarding schools, country clubs and debutante balls", but when her father lost most of his money in the stock market crash of 1929, Rosamund had to look for work.

After two years at the Traphagen School of Fashion Design in New York, she was apprenticed at an artists' studio which specialised in fashion illustration and shop window displays. Eventually she set up on her own, providing fashion illustrations for New York department stores from an apartment on Madison Avenue.

One evening in 1941 she was invited to a showing of films on Africa by the British-born big game hunter and filmmaker Kenneth Carr. Before coming to America, Carr had lived in Africa for some 28 years and had worked variously as a tattoo artist, a coffee planter and a miner of silver and tungsten.

Though he was 24 years her senior, Rosamund was instantly captivated by this dashing, exotic figure and was thrilled when he asked her out and presented her with a pin made from a lion's claw laminated in gold. They married in 1942.

It was only after the marriage that she discovered that she had made a mistake. For despite his glamorous image, Carr was painfully inhibited, protective of his privacy and did not want children. He was also penniless. When America entered the war, he got a job in Washington advising the American government on the Central African region. But when it became clear that the war would not reach Central Africa, he found his services were no longer required. Later he found a job as a field engineer for a mica mine in North Carolina. But their marriage continued to deteriorate.

By 1949 they had decided that the only solution was to move to Africa, and on July 9 that year Rosamund packed four cotton dresses and a "lifetime's supply of cold cream" and set sail with her husband from Brooklyn Harbour in a cargo ship bound for West Africa. They sailed up the Congo river to what was then Stanleyville (now Kisingani), then drove a second-hand Ford pickup truck 620 miles to the Congo-Rwanda border, where they eventually turned to managing a farm. "It was so beautiful," Rosamund Carr recalled. "You could hear monkeys at night. There was a 50-foot waterfall on the property. Sometimes elephants would roam by."

But their marriage foundered, and in 1955 Rosamund bought a 270-acre flower plantation called Mugongo in the foothills of the Virunga volcanoes in Rwanda; she moved into an ivy-clad stone cottage where she planted a formal English garden. Meanwhile, after dabbling in various reckless business ventures, her former husband lost everything when Belgium's colonial rule of the Congo ended in 1960. He eventually left the country.

For the next 40-odd years, Rosamund Carr eked out a precarious living by growing flowers which she sold to hotels, businesses and embassies in Kigali. She also began raising money to send young Rwandans to school and university.

In 1967 she met another American woman living in Rwanda, the zoologist Dian Fossey, who lived and worked among the gorillas on the slopes of a nearby mountain. The two women became best friends. Dian Fossey was murdered in 1985, probably at the hands of poachers, and in a subsequent film about her life, Gorillas in the Mist, Rosamund Carr was played by the actress Julie Harris.

On April 6 1994 a plane carrying the Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down, precipitating the slaughter of at least 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus by militant Hutus. On the evening of the assassination, two of Rosamund Carr's Tutsi shepherds asked her if they could stay in her house. By the next morning she had taken in 14 terrified refugees and found her home besieged by a club-wielding Hutu mob.

When the Interahamwe militia turned up, her Tutsis attempted to flee. There was nothing she could do to save them: "They were all killed," she recalled, "my shepherds, their mothers, their children. Eight were killed in my garden." Rosamund Carr was eventually evacuated, wearing just her nightgown and carrying a few possessions, by staff from the American embassy.

She returned to America, but the thought of what she had left behind in Africa made her feel "like a traitor", and she felt that she had to do something to help the children she saw suffering every time she turned on the television news. In August 1994 she returned to her looted home in Rwanda and established her old pyrethrum-drying plant as an orphanage for children who had lost their parents in the genocide.

When fighting broke out again in 1998 she and her orphanage moved to Gisenyi, though they returned to the Mugongo plantation in November last year. About 120 children, both Hutu and Tutsi, now live at the orphanage in a complex that includes dormitories and a school.

Despite the hardships of her life, Rosamund Carr never abandoned her sense of Manhattan style and remained immaculately coiffed and dressed even in the most distressing circumstances. She was buried in the garden of her home at Mugongo last Sunday in a ceremony attended by a crowd of admirers and local people.