24 years after her coronation in the Miss France election,
Sonia Rolland
recently looked back on her life journey through an autobiographical fiction entitled
An Unexpected Destiny
.
Invited this Sunday by Frédéric Lopez for a weekend in the countryside, accompanied by Roselyne Bachelot and Ibrahim Maalouf, Sonia Rolland agreed to look back on her childhood marked by the genocide in Rwanda.
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From the age of 9, she was sent to France for two years to live with her paternal grandmother to escape Rwanda while waiting for her father to settle their life in Burundi.
However, this move to a neighboring country was not enough to protect his family who, to escape the spread of pogroms, ultimately had to emigrate once again.
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“My father, who is French - as he was a private worker and not part of French cooperation - did not have access to the evacuation of the French. It was a terrible affront that he experienced. He was refused to return home and five years later I became Miss France. It’s a real revenge, it’s symbolically very strong,”
she explains.
“I was galvanized”
Sonia Rolland, accompanied by her mother and brother, actually managed to flee the genocide and settle in France, more precisely in Burgundy, in 1995. Only the change of scenery was radical.
“We land in a city.
My mother was the only black woman in the entire town.
»
His father only joined them more than a year later.
And nothing predestined Sonia Rolland to enter the Miss France competition.
Passionate about basketball, it was after a match that a recruiter spotted him and asked him to sign up.
“The one who believes it is my father, and since I was in love with my father I followed him on the adventure.
»
“I was also galvanized by an entourage. What's great about my story is that I arrived in a city where there was a lot of mistrust towards us because we were the foreigners who arrived. And these are the same people who contributed to my departure for Miss France. »
In fact, her neighbors had chipped in so that the young woman could accomplish this goal.
“I get emotional when I talk about it.
Here it begins
,” she jokes before emphasizing that she is not the only one to be moved.
“You're crying too, Fred.
»