On April 27, 1994, black South Africans, for the first times in their lives, voted in an election to decide who would govern their country. The lines at polling stations snaked around many blocks. It had been over thirty years since African political movements had been banned, and the leader of the strongest of them, Nelson Mandela, had spent twenty-seven of those years in prison. Most activists and observers inside and outside South Africa had thought that the “apartheid” regime, with its explicit policy promoting white supremacy, had become so deeply entrenched and its supporters so attached to their privileges that only a revolution would dislodge it. In a world that, some thirty to forty years earlier, had begun to tear down colonial empires and denounce governments which practiced racial segregation, South Africa had become a pariah, subject to boycotts of investment, travel, and trade. Now it was being redeemed, taking its place among nations which respected civil rights and democratic processes. This was indeed a revolution – whose final act was peaceful.

Three weeks earlier, a part of the vast press corps assembled to observe the electoral revolution in South Africa had been called away to report on another sort of event in another part of Africa. On April 6, what the press described as a “tribal bloodbath” began in Kigali, capital of Rwanda. It started when the plane carrying the country's President, returning from a peace discussions in Arusha, Tanzania, was shot down.