We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch; Picador USA (September 4, 1999); 356 pages; INR 558 (Amazon.in)
Rating: 5.0/5.0
Gourevitch’s account of the massacre of the Tutsis is not only haunting for its honesty and close-up view of on-ground reality (through heart-wrenching anecdotes of ‘survivors’), but also for saying the truth for what it is. Western intervention has been a silent bystander to the atrocities, and it has tried to absolve itself through aid in the politics of neocolonialism. Rwanda was in perfect harmony with itself, until the spectre of German invasion came storming in. The attendant ‘scientific’ claims of a superior race, the Tutsis, and their inferior subjects, the Hutus, changed the social fabric of one nation into a ticking time-bomb of two irreconcilable ‘tribal’ factions. After the defeat of the Germans in World War I, power was transferred to the Belgians.The new colonialists viewed the administrative favours bestowed upon the Tutsis as being analogous to the situation back home, where the minority French Walloons lorded over the majority Flemish. In an attempt to instigate (majoritarian) democracy, the tables were turned and the floodgates to an unspeakable massacre of the Tutsis were opened under the regime (and after the death of) President Habyarimana. In a blood-soaked century that saw the genocide of the Jews in World War II and the Serbian atrocities in the Balkans, the international community seems to have not only abandoned the Tutsis, but also aided, the génocidaires, all in an attempt to ‘value treaties and written words over human lives’ and to ‘fight the war of Francophone supremacy over the alleged threat of an Anglophone invasion by the RPF (the Tutsis in neighbouring Zaire, later Congo, who were fighting to get the displaced Tutsis back home to Rwanda). One of the many paragraphs that is quite haunting is as follows: “the humanitarian mindset is not to think—just do…when humanitarian aid becomes a smoke-screen to cover the political effects it actually creates, and states hide behind it, using it as a vehicle for policymaking, then we can be regarded as agents in the conflict.”
What is refreshing about the book is the attempt to foretell the future of Africa in a language of hope, while not evading the difficult process of reconciliation without bringing the (more than a million) perpetrators of the massacre to the (non-existent) courts. For a continent that has been ignored for far too long, this introduction to the complexities and complicitous meddling in Africa has me asking for much more. Possibly one of my favourite books till date.
bongfrombombay 