Voices of the Bridge, ep. 1 — "My best friend is Tutsi, and I am Hutu"
For the first episode of our anti-tribalism series, two friends tell how their friendship survived the hate speech of their own families.
Eric and Jean-Bosco met at a Goma high school in 2014. Today one is an engineer, the other a journalist. Between them sits a word the Great Lakes region cannot quite forget: ethnicity.
"When my mother heard I spent weekends at Eric's place, she cried for two days," Jean-Bosco recalls. "She would not say why. But I knew."
In this 38-minute episode they revisit — without filter — the sentences heard at home, the silences they had to break, and the times they almost lost each other. A rare conversation, recorded in Goma in March 2026.
The podcast is available in French and Swahili. The full transcript is online, and a discussion guide ships with every episode for schools, associations and youth groups that want to keep the conversation going.