The Saturday Interview: Adidja Umutoni survived an unspeakable hell, but now she has control over her own destiny, as Mark Smith discovers
The bright orange-and-yellow walls of Adidja Umutoni's beautiful little hairdressing salon in Govan evoke the African homeland she will probably never see again.
Behind every business is a story, and this one is extraordinary.
Umutoni, a 37-year-old refugee from the killing fields of the Rwandan genocide, has come through an unspeakable hell to get here.
This is home now, here in the heart of this gritty Glasgow neighbourhood on the south side of the River Clyde.
And this little shop, with its soon-to-be-repaired shattered storefront window, is where Umutoni has packed all her ambitions and dreams for the future.
She believes in hope and hard work.
In her shop, which she calls Just for Me, Umutoni spends up to eight hours on each customer, her fingers work the long strands of her customers' unwieldy hair with extraordinary dexterity. She is often rapt in concentration.
It is impossible to know what lies behind her soft brown eyes as she skillfully and delicately twists and pleats, weaving their hair with her dreams, as though she were somehow magically creating the intricate braids of the baskets once famed in her former Rwandan home.
I visited her on a winter's day of gloom and grey rain at her shop on Govan Road. The lights seem brighter than those in the other shops on the street and they reflect on the wet pavement outside her door. As I enter, Umutoni greets me with a gentle smile and soft handshake.
The colourful walls reflect in the salon's tall mirrors and, in spite of the chill in the air and the low-pitched hiss of a heater in the corner, the interior here somehow creates the illusion that the African sun is beating down.
"It's not finished yet," she says. "My husband did most of this. I want it to look nice."
She looks now at the cracked front window and shrugs. Then adds, "We will fix that when we can."
For generations, immigrants from around the world - first the Irish, then Jewish refugees from Russia and eastern Europe, then Italians, Indians, Pakistanis, Poles, Chinese and more recently asylum-seekers from a myriad of the globe's trouble spots - have transformed little corners of Glasgow into an approximation of the countries they left behind.
For the past two months, Umutoni has been following in their footsteps.
She arrived in Glasgow as an asylum-seeker in 2001 with her two children. Two years later, she was granted asylum and eventually met her husband. She describes him as a factory worker and says that she met him after she arrived in Scotland. She declines to say more about him.
Yet she recalls: "It was very lonely at first. It was a difficult time in the beginning. I had two children and no money and almost no possessions."
She scans her shop, then smiles and adds: "But I dreamed of this, a dream of making a small shop, to be economically independent."
After being granted asylum, Umutoni spent many hours attending Cardonald College to better her English-language skills and improve her education. She also worked as a cleaner to help make ends meet, squirrelling away what she could after each meagre wage.
After five years, she accumulated £1200 - enough to open her salon and shop in November, where she also sells African hair products and cosmetics. Those savings buy her less than four months' rent, rates and utility bills - so at around £40 per customer, she has her work cut out.
"My idea is to draw the customers in," she says. "I can maybe put the prices up later."
Her customer base is representative of the 1000-plus influx of African immigrants who, like Umutoni, have come to the Govan-Cardonald area in recent years to escape the terrible experiences of their past.
She also hopes her skills and her shop will entice Scotswomen to have their hair pleated, braided and woven as well, and she has plans expand into the sale of clothes imported from Africa.
Always smiling it seems, she possesses little more than her dreams and a quiet determination that she must somehow embrace her ambition and weave a new life for herself and her family.
Yet for Umutoni, the ideas of entrepreneurship and running her own business have transcended the banal ambitions of merely making money.
This business is also about repairing the damage of the past, overcoming profound trauma and healing psychological wounds created by terrifying experiences by building a future and striving to ascend in 21st-century Britain.
Not that money is not important. After all, Umutoni is a survivor and she remains a determined businesswoman.
The roots of Umutoni's story go back to Kigali, Rawanda's capital, where she ran one of the city's most popular hairdressing salons.
But the details of what came next are sketchy.
Umutoni does not want to talk about what she went through during the genocide that revealed to her the ultimate darkness of humanity.
An estimated 800,000 men, women and children were murdered during a 100-day ethnic slaughter and massacre that began in April 1994 and pitted Hutu extremists against Tutsi and Hutu moderates.
Hundreds of thousands more were raped, orphaned, widowed and made homeless.
When Umutoni uses the word, "genocide", it is uttered emotionlessly, matter-of-factly, as though it were a giant mountain, something that can never be moved or altered. It seems as though if she were to inject her own emotion into that word, an avalanche of terrible memories would rain down and crush her beneath the scree.
"I have had enough of talking about the past," she says. "There were killings, yes, But I don't want to talk about that. I want to forget the past. I want to try to forget everything. I only want to think about the future. I want only to think about my business and my family."
I ask if her experiences in Rwanda, and her determination to survive, have somehow better equipped her to withstand the difficulties of starting a business on Govan Road. After all, what are a few non-educated delinquents in Govan when you have survived the bullets, machete attacks and the hatred of an ethnic massacre?
Her reply is shocking. "Determination had nothing to do with it. It was luck and chance and God's will. I thank God I'm alive, that's all."
Asked to explain, there is suddenly a hard look in her eyes - but no explanation is forthcoming.
Yet there is the hint of something so awful in her story, revealed piecemeal, it defies description. There are a few sketchy and terrifying details about seven people in a car. It seems the car is stopped at a roadblock. Something violent and fearful ensues. Of the seven, four are ordered out of the vehicle and murdered execution-style. Umutoni and two others are left alive.
I remember now that she said she had arrived in Scotland with her two children but no husband or parents. I remember she tells me that she had met her current husband in Glasgow. She does not want to clarify further.
She says: "Before the genocide I was a hairdresser in Kigali. I had many customers. Customers always came back. That is what I want here, and live."
Umutoni looks out through the shattered window on to grey and rainy Govan Road.
"Glasgow is good," she says. "People are friendly. It's a good place to live and a good place for a business."
Then it becomes clear. Umutoni's story is about coming through hell and telling yourself, I can still do this.
It is also about economic independence and self-respect, and there can be no loftier ambitions for any business.
