Genocide in Rwanda: Philip Gourevitch's non-fiction classic

Is genocide a suitable subject for literature? Or is genocide, in Saul Friedländer’s words, a history “too massive to be forgotten, and too repellent to be integrated into the normal narrative of memory”: a fact that renders erudition, irony, humour and poetry impossible?

In the spring of 1994, Rwanda was – as Philip Gourevitch insists, with his characteristic interest in accuracy of vocabulary – “decimated”: at least one in 10 of the population were killed. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans participated in the killing, with machetes and clubs, murdering about a million people, including 70% of the entire Tutsi population, in six weeks. Fergal Keane, a BBC correspondent in Rwanda at the time, insists that no description is appropriate or adequate for such horror. Genocide is something inexpressible, and incomprehensible: “In writing about Rwanda, I am conscious that my words will always be unequal to the task … what I encountered was evil in a form that frequently rendered me inarticulate.”

But Gourevitch’s book insists on being always articulate. In the hardest situations, his reactions can remain uncannily precise: even while claiming to be baffled, for example, he pinpoints six, exact, separate reactions, carefully arranged: “revulsion, alarm, sorrow, grief, shame, incomprehension”. He is also prepared to be leisurely, indirect and even witty. The book opens in a bar in the African hills where our narrator is alone with a group of drunken soldiers, and a man in a tracksuit.

“He asked my name in stern, robotic English, each syllable precise and abrupt. I told him, “Philip.”

“Ah.” He clutched my hand. “Like in Charles Dickens.”

“That’s Pip,” I said.

“Great Expectations,” he pronounced … His lips bunched up tightly and he considered me with his humourless stare. Then he said, “I am a pygmy from the jungle. But I learned English from an Anglican bishop.”

The book begins then, not with a scene of death but with what seems – at first – to be a literary comedy. There is no reference to Tutsis or Hutus. Instead a pygmy – with no direct connection to the genocide – is discussing how to imagine the Dutch. Or more specifically a Dutch girl, who has wisely escaped to bed. His insistence on Great Expectations in the African night recalls Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, in which the hero is condemned to spend the rest of his life, with the works of Charles Dickens, in the jungle. The pygmy opens, however, the central question of the book: the exact nature of man’s inhumanity.

It is only in chapter four – after immersing us in intimately reported stories of the mindset and mechanism of the killing in Rwanda – that Gourevitch begins to analyse the causes of the genocide.

At the heart of the genocide was repetition, which is so often the enemy of understanding. In every hamlet, in every province, the machete or club rose and fell, again and again – not once or twice, but a million separate times.

The New York Times tried to avoid moral judgments at the time, stating in articles that “no one’s hands are clean” or quoting approvingly the expert view that “it’s not a story of good guys and bad guys”. But Gourevitch in We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families is clear that there were better guys and worse guys – much better and much worse. And it seems that, for Gourevitch, a stance of moral ambivalence and a refusal to judge is a “useless notion” – and even implies complicity with the worst. He believes that a foreign observer has, like Rwandans themselves, “no choice” other than to make political and moral judgments. He therefore plunges into 19th-century accounts (and racial prejudice), the work of 1950s Belgian colonels, of anthropologists, and human-rights reports. And he combines this research with contemporary reportage: visiting the Rwandan town where a massacre occurred, and then travelling to a small town in south Texas to find the pastor who ordered the killings.

Gourevitch goes into the prisons into which tens of thousands were crowded, waiting years for a trial. He records the post-genocide strongman, Paul Kagame, lying to him. He looks directly, and in detail, at the massacre at the Kibeho displaced-persons camp, and includes the eyewitness accounts of aid workers, who had to stamp across the bodies of dying babies to save men, women and children seeking refuge from Kagame’s forces. And he also records Kagame admitting that Rwandan refugees were similarly killed in the Congo. Gourevitch makes no excuses for these atrocities. He concludes, however, that the assault on refugee camps was justified (because they were powerful military bases for genocidaires) and even as he calls Kagame “ruthless”, he makes claims for him he does not make for anyone else in this bloody chapter of history: “He was a man of rare scope – a man of action with an acute human and political intelligence.”

In the nearly 20 years since Gourevitch’s book was published, and established by overwhelming acclaim as a contemporary classic of political reportage, Kagame has emerged not only as the dominant figure of post-genocide Rwanda – he has been president since 2000 – but also as one of the most polarising figures in global public opinion. Because of his authoritarian rule, and the accumulating death toll that followed Rwandan interventions in Congo, some observers have disagreed strongly with Gourevitch’s nuanced portrait of Kagame. Others have praised Gourevitch for his prescience and courage in allowing for the possibility of a positive future for Kagame’s Rwanda, at a time when it seemed almost unimaginable that it could recover from the genocide. Knowing that he was writing in the throes of contested history– at a moment when essential facts about the genocide and its broader regional and geopolitical contexts were still being disputed in the press, in the corridors of power, and on the battlefields of Africa – Gourevitch was careful to conclude his book with the dates his reporting began and his writing ended: May 1995–April 1998.

His account holds up, however, and his central arguments remain very powerful. His basic portrait of Rwanda – as a place not naturally split but instead unified through one language, one religion, one territory – is compelling. So too is his conclusion: that there were many contributing factors – resentments from the colonial period, massacres in the 1960s, a civil war/invasion – but none of them led inevitably to genocide. The genocide was an entirely gratuitous crime, planned by the Hutu government, and executed through the channels of the state. Rwanda was often presented as a “failed state”. But in fact, “the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorising and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously administered states in history”.

He gives full form to the small cadre of people who directed the killing, their use of radios, their reliance on poorly armed villagers, and the role France played in backing the genocidal regime. And today, at a moment when intervention has never seemed so unpopular – and is reserved for disrupting terrorist networks – Gourevitch’s book provides one of the clearest illustrations of the way the west might have stopped the Rwandan genocide. If France had backed off, and if the US hadn’t; if the UN had agreed to the proposal of its commander, General Dallaire, for such simple acts as shutting down the radio station, or seizing weapons caches; if the US and the UK had deployed troops to protect displaced people, and if the international system had not sustained the genocidal regime, its army and militias in the refugee camps of Zaire, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved, and at relatively little risk or cost to the west.

But the book should not be treated simply as a primer on Africa; nor should Gourevitch be criticised or revered simply as a policy analyst (as he has been in countless university courses on human rights or intervention). We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families is an exercise not in political science but in the imagination. Gourevitch insists on the exact features of the individual experience, and evokes a million stories by following a dozen. He is not interested in only telling the chronological narrative of the genocide. Instead, he employs an ingeniously difficult structure. He leaps from the pygmy, to a scene a year after the genocide to a class with the gorilla researcher Dian Fossey at Cornell University in the early 80s, and then back to Rwanda in the early 60s, via a digression to a German essay on post-cold war civil conflicts, and VS Naipaul, weaving between six separate visits and hundreds of interviews and autobiographical digressions.

At times the tone is immensely leisured, even comic. Chapter 11, for example, begins by trying to list every dog he has seen in Rwanda – “a pair of toy poodles … a fat golden retriever … some German shepherds” – and realising they are all owned by foreigners. “I began to wonder whether, in Rwanda, cats had won their eternal war with dog-kind.” Finally, he finds a Rwandan dog. Except, it transpires, “that dog might have just slipped over the border from Zaire a few hundred yards away”, and it is soon repatriated by a cook “and a whack of a long wooden spoon”. This shaggy-dog story about the absence of dogs finds its punchline in the devouring of human corpses.

He never conceals how difficult it is for him to be sure of his information, as in his conversation with Girumuhatse, a Hutu, who had personally chopped down and killed at least 11 people:

“I know of six people who were killed before my eyes by my own orders.”
“Did you never kill with your own hands?”
“It is possible that I did,” Girumuhatse said. “Because if I didn’t they’d have killed my wife.”
“Possible?” I said. “Or true?”
Bosco, the translator, said, “You know what he means,” and didn’t translate the question.

Many hours of patient interviews allow him to describe every hour of one family’s experience through a single day. The story of a doctor, Jean-Baptiste, who decides against his better judgement to put on pyjamas and delay escaping the killers for an extra night, his attempt to bribe the police with traveller’s cheques, his sudden pre-dawn flight from the capital, his family’s confusion in the papyrus reeds by the river bank, the scream of their hidden child, their sister-in-law ripped from their group and hacked to death, their hard decision to retrace their steps back into the centre of the killing in the capital, despite all that it had cost them to try to leave, is almost impossible to forget.

Sometimes the most moving and troubling images emerge indirectly and unexpectedly. There is the title – one of the longest in world literature – and its mystifying first person plural voice. It echoes a bureaucratic announcement: “We wish to inform you that … (the 17:23 to Oxenholme will be delayed, due to staff shortages at Preston).” It can be read as a statement about the immediate future, made in the past. The reader can guess that the people making this appeal with their curiously formal diction have already been killed, with their families. Only later, however, does Gourevitch reveal the full letter these words come from, and give us its precise context.

At other times,he moves from indirect, allusive passages to troublingly blatant prose. The 1,500 children, men and women who were hacked to pieces in and around the church of Nyarubuye were left unburied, as they fell, as a memorial. Keane, who arrived on the scene a few weeks after the massacre, argues that it’s natural “to write about Nyarubuye … as simply as possible. This is not a subject for fine words.” And he describes it, in the way one might expect, cataloguing the atrocities, with a few unremarkable adjectives: A woman … is wearing a red cardigan and a blue dress but the clothes have begun to rot away, revealing the decaying body underneath … I look down to my left and see a child who has been hacked almost into two pieces. The body is in a state of advanced decay and I cannot tell if it is a boy or a girl. Here the dead have no dignity.

But Gourevitch, visiting the memorial site a year later, doesn’t feel that he has to avoid “fine words”. Instead, he writes so elegantly about the scene that his description risks offending much of what we feel “should” be felt, thought or said:

The dead at Nyarubuye were, I’m afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around it. The skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquillity of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there – these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place.

Gourevitch will not allow us to turn away. He repeats, insists (“no getting around it”), on beauty in a way that seems almost irresponsible. The elegance and rhythm of the passage – moving from the language of art criticism to poetry – is itself beautiful, and that beauty also only adds to its affront. He implicates the reader uncomfortably in the scene, through a classical reference, an assumption of voyeuristic desires, and a formal prose. (“Like Leontius, the young Athenian in Plato, I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity.”) He refuses to be discreet or polite. He insists on the necessity of overcoming our impulse to look away, and of getting to grips with even the most troubling material.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (which won the inaugural Guardian first book award in 1999) is based on nine months of travel over three years, in often dangerous and very disturbing places. It includes a hundred separate reflections on the human imagination: from the inability of victims to reflect on life outside the genocide (“in normal times we lived normally”) to the incongruous heroism of Paul Rusesabagina (“a mild-mannered man, sturdily built and rather ordinary looking – a bourgeois hotel manager, after all – and that is how he seemed to regard himself as well, as an ordinary person who did nothing extraordinary in refusing to cave in to the insanity that swirled around him”).

It relies on the scrupulous pursuit of witnesses thousands of miles apart, the careful recording and reconciliation of contradictory accounts, and the patience to piece together the most confusing and unpleasant incidents. But what makes it distinctive is not the aphorisms or the research but the literary form. And this is not only a question of a striking vocabulary, or the vigorous rhythm of the prose, but also of unexpected juxtapositions, a willingness to outrage the reader and dissect the most ambiguous and bewildering situations.

Keane concludes after seeing the first hundred bodies at Nyarubuye: “I do not know what else to say about the bodies because I have already seen too much. I cannot imagine it because my powers of visualisation cannot possibly encompass the magnitude of the terror.”

Gourevitch is never lost for words. He is not willing to accept the impossibility of visualising terror, just as he won’t accept that Rwanda is “an impossible country”. He will not be turned away, suspend judgment or fall back on discreet evasions. Instead, he has brought all his education, irony, “civilisation”, analytical power and tough-mindedness to the task of unlocking the incomprehensible. He asserts that nothing – not even the Rwandan genocide – need be alien to human understanding. His greatness as a writer lies in bringing such a sensibility to a subject of such immensity, in tackling it so exactingly, and in having the confidence never to moderate his prose. Or shut his eyes.