Philip Gourevitch on Rwanda

You're writing a new book on Rwanda and have gone back twice this year, for the first time in nearly a decade. How have things changed since you wrote We Wish to Inform You…?

When I finished writing We Wish to Inform You… I was very conscious of putting dates at the end of it – May 1995-April 1998. I did that because I felt that was the precise period of my immersion in Rwanda, and because I was aware that future events could massively alter the way that period of history looked. Those dates are there to say: this is how it looked at the time. Who knew what might happen in the six months after I signed off on the manuscript and the book appeared, much less in the next five or ten – or now 15 – years? The leadership could be violently overthrown or abruptly change its direction or there could be more massacres – even, conceivably, worse than the last round. And, of course, it could go the other way. There could be a level of peace and stability and coexistence of the sort we now see but that was unforeseeable at that time. I talk about that in the book; there’s a line where I say: ‘Maybe, if you’re reading this in the future – five, or ten or 50 years from now – you’ll be taking this book with you as you plan your vacation in Rwanda.’ And when I went back in January, tourism was booming. People were actually reading that book as they arrived there on holiday and, yes, the country is one of the safest in Africa.

But don’t get too comfortable about it. Rwanda’s still a terribly complex and problematic place. It’s not an open society. It’s not a place without violence, and obviously the incredible, appalling legacy of the genocide colours everything. And yet, the government’s project of making people live together and insisting that they must make a nation together – not just any people, but killers and survivors – is an extraordinary experiment. There really is no precedent for it in modern human history. To say that it is working far better than I’d have anticipated does not mean that we can yet say it is really a success. For that, generations must pass. And in the meantime, while establishing physical security at home, President Paul Kagame has waged a series of wars in Congo over a long period of time and at great detriment to the national reputation (not to mention to the people of Congo). And he has done this – and he defends the wars and their damage – in the name of a simple nationalist idea that Rwanda has got to bring everybody home, that the country cannot afford to be divided within or without, that those who committed genocide or now threaten to must be integrated into the society: they may give up their fight, or they must be crushed. And to make that idea live, Kagame has integrated into his army and his government a great many former enemies, just as he asks ordinary citizen survivors to forego revenge and live alongside the killers of their families. It is extraordinary to behold and to get one’s mind around it.

So, in short, I think Rwanda has gone from being the most fascinatingly torn apart country on earth to perhaps being the most complex and strangely compelling story of a country putting itself back together. I say ‘strangely’ in the sense that it simply defies all expectation – and to a large degree defies belief. There was a survivor who was talking about living with killers around, and he said to me: ‘It’s our obligation, it’s our duty, it’s our necessity, it’s the only way we can survive and I do it every day. And yet it’s incomprehensible to me.’ That sums up the national condition.

So the first book you recommend is actually three books – all by a French journalist?

One of the things that writing about Rwanda doesn’t offer you – although writing about many other fascinating places does – is a substantial literature by the people you’re writing about. There just aren’t many books by Rwandans that are readily accessible to an outsider. There is a Kinyarwandan (Kinyarwanda is the language) oral tradition, there’s a lot of poetry and in the last century more and more written stuff, but little of it has been translated, and of the writing on the genocide that’s taken place – their own recent history – most of it has taken place in French or English. And most of it has not been done by Rwandans. Under the circumstances, I would say that the most fascinating literary project about Rwanda in the last few years has been by Jean Hatzfeld. He is a French writer and reporter who worked for a long time for the newspaper Libération and covered the Balkan wars. For the last six or seven years, he has been visiting Rwanda on and off, and always going to the same small town in the southeast. The first book he wrote took a kind of a hybrid form – a mixture of oral history and personal reflection – and it was based on the stories of a group of survivors who had spent the 100 days or so of the genocide hiding in these dense papyrus swamps near their home. They were being hunted there by a gang of killers from around their village, people whom they knew. What makes this a great book is not just its subject matter, but its style and its voice. Hatzfeld is obviously someone who spent a huge amount of time just hanging out in the village, in the bars, in the backyards, in the fields, with people who had had this experience – and he relates their stories with unmediated immediacy, and with great soul.

When Hatzfeld finished that book, which was called Dans le Nu de la Vie (or in English translation Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak) people asked him, well what about the killers? So he wound up going back to Rwanda and realised that the whole group of killers who had been pursuing the survivors he’d been writing about were all in one prison nearby.