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An account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity. It chronicles what has happened in Rwanda since 1994, when the government called on the Hutu majority to murder the Tutsi minority. Some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives the book its title.;The author descibes the anguish of genocide's aftermath: mass displacements; revenge and the quest for justice; and impossibly crowded prisons and refugee camps. Through portraits of Rwandans in all walks of life, he focuses on the psychological and political challenges of survival.
In April 1995, a year after the genocide began, Bill Buford of The New Yorker despatched his most talented young staff reporter to Rwanda. Gourevitch arrived carrying most of the necessary equipment: compassion, imagination, humour, emotional resilience, fair-mindedness, political shrewdness and an unwavering moral compass. During the next three years he spent long periods there, probing ever more deeply into its tragedy. This situation and its consequences were not - as many like to imagine - a peculiarly 'African' aberration and Gourevitch deftly unravels the tangled skein of outside influences. Let no-one be deterred by his blood-soaked subject. He is a superb storyteller and this is a narrative of extraordinary interest leading to unexpected conclusions. Gourevitch skilfully avoids sensationalism while never allowing his readers to dodge the uniquely dreadful and evil realities of genocide. On one level this book is a meticulously researched study of Rwanda's crimes against humanity - its historical origins, its political organization, its social and psychological aftermath. On another level, it records Gourevitch's personal struggle to understand the diseased postcolonial culture in which the genocide is embedded. No-one else has written so perceptively about the agonizing dilemmas and conflicts that continue to torment this severely traumatized society. It is not now (perhaps never was?) a welcoming society; outsiders are distrusted. Yet one senses that during Gourevitch's involvement he came to be accepted by many Rwandans - of all sorts - as someone who truly cared about their tragedy, for whom it was not merely 'raw material' to be profitably processed. Unusually this author combines a scholarly approach to his subject and a warm relationship with his readers. In his congenial company, what might have been a depressing and harrowing narrative is 'a good read'. Given the grim context it may seem crass to use the adjective 'enjoyable' - yet any book, whatever its theme, has to be enjoyable when it is so well written. Review by DERVLA MURPHY
About the author (1999)
Philip Gourevitch, a staff writer at "The New Yorker", lives in New York City. His last book, "We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda" (FSG, 1998), won the National Book Critics Circle & Los Angeles Times Book Awards.
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