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The Bicyclists of Rwanda | The New Yorker

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Gasore Hategeka bought his first bicycle in 2008. It was a heavily used, Chinese-made single-speed, and it cost thirty-five thousand Rwandan francs—roughly sixty dollars. Gasore, who was about twenty years old, had worked for nearly half his life before he could afford it. His father had once owned a bicycle, and although Gasore told me that he could not remember much from when he was young, he said, “I liked how the bike worked, the device. I remember him carrying me on the bike to work the fields far from our village, and when my father died I thought of the bike.” So he felt a calling, or that is how he liked to explain himself. He said, “It was my dream always—it was always in my head, the bike.” When Gasore spoke of the bike, he meant something almost mystical: the embodiment of an ideal of self-propulsion. Gasore isn’t sure exactly when he was born, so he doesn’t know if he was nine or ten in 1997, when his father died. His mother had died when he was an infant, and his father ha

Save this story Save this story Gasore Hategeka bought his first bicycle in 2008. It was a heavily used, Chinese-made single-speed, and it cost thirty-five thousand Rwandan francs—roughly sixty dollars. Gasore, who was about twenty years old, had worked for nearly half his life before he could afford it. His father had once owned a bicycle, and although Gasore told me that he could not remember much from when he was young, he said, “I liked how the bike worked, the device. I remember him carrying me on the bike to work the fields far from our village, and when my father died I thought of the b

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