A year after the genocide of 1994 in Rwanda I visited Ntarama, a village near the capital Kigali, where Tutsis had been mown down in a church. The new government had not removed the corpses, so the church was like a mortuary with bodies lying as they had fallen the year before. The stench was overpowering. Outside, there was a collection of skulls. Some still had pangas (machetes) and daggers embedded in them. I tried to pray. Instead I broke down and wept.

The scene was deeply disturbing, and a moving monument to the viciousness that we as human beings are capable of unleashing against our fellow creatures. Those who had turned against one another in this gory fashion had, in many instances, lived amicably in the same villages. They had spoken the same language. Many had inter-married. Most espoused the same faith. Most were Christian.

Their European overlords had sought to maintain their hegemony by favouring one ethnic group, the Tutsi, over another, the Hutu. They thus planted the seeds of what would be one of the bloodiest episodes in modern African history. That genocide also made one pause in blaming racism for every conceivable ill that has befallen humankind. Because while whites had a hand in fomenting the internecine strife in Rwanda, the perpetrators were blacks . . . against fellow blacks.

A few kilometres from the church in Ntarama, women had begun to build a settlement which they named the Nelson Mandela Village. It was to be a home for widows and orphans created by the genocide. The women said: "We must mourn and weep for the dead. But life must also go on; we can't go on weeping." Wonderfully impressive. Indomitable.

At Ntarama, you might say, there was Calvary, death and crucifixion. In the Nelson Mandela Village there was resurrection, new life, new beginning, new hope. It was noteworthy, again, how women have this remarkable resilience and instinct for nurturing life.

I visited the overcrowded prison at Kigali. It was packed to the rafters with people suspected of being involved in the genocide. Almost all were Hutu. There were men and women. Even young children. People of every age and from every social group - including priests, nuns, teachers and lawyers. Some had died from suffocation. I told the country's President Pasteur Bizimungu that the prison was a disaster waiting to happen and that it would add to bitter memories and exacerbate the resentment of the Hutu towards the Tutsi.

At a rally in the main stadium at Kigali I said the story of Rwanda was a typical history of "top dog" and "underdog". Top dog wanted to cling to a privileged position. The underdog strove to topple top dog. When that happened the new top dog engaged in an orgy of retribution to pay back the new underdog for all the pain and suffering inflicted when it was top dog.

New underdog fought like an enraged bull to topple new top dog. It stored in its memory all the pain and suffering it was now enduring, forgetting that new top dog was - in its view - just retaliating for what it remembered suffering when new underdog was master. A sad history of reprisal provoking counter-reprisal.

I reminded the Tutsi that they had waited for 30 years to get their own back for what they perceived to be the injustices that had been heaped on them. I told them extremists among the Hutu were also capable of waiting 30 years - or more - for the day when they could topple the new government. Then, in their turn, they would unleash devastation, revenge and resentment.

I discussed the talk about tribunals. People did not want to tolerate allowing the (mainly Hutu) criminals escape punishment. What I feared was retributive justice. If it was to be the last word in their situation, then Rwanda had had it.

There is no way that most Hutu were going to be persuaded that the courts would find them guilty because the evidence is incontrovertible. That any court, anywhere in the world, confronted with such evidence, would pronounce them guilty. They would feel they had been found guilty, not because they were guilty, but because they were Hutu. And they would wait for the day when they would be able to take revenge. Then they would pay back the Tutsi, for the horrendous prison conditions in which they were then being held.

I told the Tutsi that the cycle of reprisal and counter-reprisal which characterised their national history had to be broken. That the only way to do this was to go beyond retributive justice to restorative justice; that they had to move on to forgiveness, because without it there was no future.

The president of Rwanda responded with considerable magnanimity. They were ready to forgive, he said, but even Jesus had declared that the devil could not be forgiven. I do not know where he found the basis for that, but he was expressing a view that found a resonance. There were atrocities that were unforgivable.

But I was given a fair and indeed friendly hearing. Why was I not rebuffed? Why did these traumatised people, who had undergone such a terrible experience, listen to an unpopular point of view? They listened because something had happened in South Africa. It gave them reason to pause, and wonder.

The world had expected a ghastly bloodbath would overwhelm South Africa. It did not happen. Then the world thought that, after a democratically elected government was put in place, those who for so long had been denied their rights, whose dignity had been trodden underfoot, callously and without compunction, would go on the rampage, unleashing an orgy of revenge and retribution that would devastate their common motherland.

Instead there was the remarkable (Truth and Reconciliation) Commission. Before it people told their heart-rending stories. Victims expressed a willingness to forgive. Perpetrators told stories of sordid atrocities, and asked the forgiveness of those they had wronged so grievously.

The world could not believe what it was seeing. South Africans managed an extraordinary, reasonably peaceful transition from the awfulness of repression to the relative stability of democracy. They confounded everyone by their novel manner of dealing with a horrendous past.