We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch.

3/5 rating. 353 pages.

Book #44 of 2021. Read May 15, 2021.

This book is a journalist’s look at the Rwandan genocide of 1994 (and its aftermath) through interviews and experience of his time in Rwanda.

As we pass the 75th anniversary of the end of WWII and the atrocities of the Holocaust, it is always attended by statements such as “Never Forget” and “It won’t happen again”. But in 1994, it did happen again, and the international community did everything in their power to look the other way and to force the survivors to forget. It is an absolute horror and tragedy that my knowledge of this genocide was basically from the movie “Hotel Rwanda”, but I feel like this is probably telling of the view of its importance in the Western world.

In 100 days, nearly a million Rwandan Tutsis were slaughtered throughout the country. Even though there are cultural divides between the Hutu and Tutsi groups, they had lived relatively peacefully together for most of their existence (at least up until the late 1950s). As President Clinton said: “It is important that the world know that these killings were not spontaneous or accidental…they were most certainly not the result of ancient tribal struggles….These events grew from a policy aimed at the systematic destruction of a people.”

Rwanda has done some amazing healing since ’94, but I think this book is a powerful testament to the fear, the horror, and the mechanisms of the genocide. While the book is not really a page-turner, its ability to open up a window into the worst tragedy in my lifetime makes it worth a read. At times, it’s certainly hard to even imagine the carnage, the corpses, and the survivors, but I think it’s important to understand our past – and especially the reach of media, influence, and division – so we have a better chance of actually stopping the next massacre in the beginning before we have to look back and claim “Never again”.

Quotes:

“[I]t was my imagination that wanted soothing.” – Heart of Darkness

“Silence is peace.”

“So Rwandan history is dangerous. Like all of history, it is a record of successive struggles for power, and to a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality – even, as is often the case, when that story is written in their blood.”

“We, each of us, functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us…”

“Killing Tutsis was a political tradition in postcolonial Rwanda; it brought people together.”

“If everybody is implicated, then implication becomes meaningless.”

“‘The problem isn’t the equipment,’ Kagame told me. ‘The problem is always the man behind it. Does he understand why he is fighting?’”

“The RPF had hardly gone to war for humanitarian reasons, but it had effectively been the only force on earth to live up to the requirements of the 1948 Genocide Convention.”

“‘People are not inherently bad,’ [Kagame] told me. ‘But they can be made bad.’”

“[O]ne of the dominant needs of the needy soul is to be needed.”

“All these organizations – they will give blankets, food, yes. But save lives? No, they can’t.” – Mokoto monk, Father Victor

“If Rwanda’s experience could be said to carry any lessons for the world, it was that endangered peoples who depend on the international community for physical protection stand defenseless.”

“But the students had refused. At both schools, the girls said they were simply Rwandans, so they were beaten and shot indiscriminately.”

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