We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (43 page)

Still, in Rwanda, where expectations of the great powers had been bitterly diminished to very nearly zero, Clinton’s account of the political organization of the genocide and his praise for the government’s “efforts to create a single nation in which all citizens can live freely and securely” were understood as the sharpest international rebuke yet to the ongoing bid by the
génocidaires
to equate ethnicity with politics and to prove that equation by murder. It was a measure of Rwanda’s sense of isolation that his remarks were heralded as extraordinary. After all, Clinton was simply proclaiming the obvious. But he had been under no political pressure to pay attention to Rwanda; he might more easily have continued to ignore the place and said nothing. Instead, having chosen to sit out the genocide, he was making what was—even at so late a date—a dramatic intervention in the war about the genocide. As the voice of the greatest power on earth, he had come to Kigali to set the record straight.

“It was very startling to us,” a Hutu friend told me over the phone from Kigali. “Here was a politician who had nothing at stake, and who told the truth at his own expense.” And a Tutsi I called told me, “What he said to us is that we are not just forgotten savages. Maybe you have to live somewhere far away like the White House to see Rwanda like that. Life here remains terrible. But your Mr. Clinton made us feel less alone.” He laughed. “It should be surprising that somebody who didn’t really seem to mind seeing your people get killed can make you feel like that. But it’s hard to surprise a Rwandan anymore.”

I CANNOT COUNT the times, since I first began visiting Rwanda three years ago, that I’ve been asked, “Is there any hope for that place?” In response, I like to quote the hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina. When he told me that the genocide had left him “disappointed,” Paul added, “With my countrymen—Rwandans—you never know what they will become tomorrow.” Although he didn’t mean it that way, this struck me as one of the most optimistic things a Rwandan could say after the genocide, not unlike General Kagame’s claim that people “can be made bad, and they can be taught to be good.”

But hope is a force more easy to name and declare one’s allegiance to than to enact. So I’ll leave you to decide if there is hope for Rwanda with one more story. On April 30, 1997—almost a year ago as I write—Rwandan television showed footage of a man who confessed to having been among a party of
génocidaires
who had killed seventeen schoolgirls and a sixty-two-year-old Belgian nun at a boarding school in Gisenyi two nights earlier. It was the second such attack on a school in a month; the first time, sixteen students were killed and twenty injured in Kibuye.

The prisoner on television explained that the massacre was part of a Hutu Power “liberation” campaign. His band of a hundred fifty militants was composed largely of ex-FAR and
interahamwe
. During their attack on the school in Gisenyi, as in the earlier attack on the school in Kibuye, the students, teenage girls who had been roused from their sleep, were ordered to separate themselves—Hutus from Tutsis. But the students had refused. At both schools, the girls said they were simply Rwandans, so they were beaten and shot indiscriminately.

Rwandans have no need—no room in their corpse-crowded imaginations—for more martyrs. None of us does. But mightn’t we all take some courage from the example of those brave Hutu girls who could have chosen to live, but chose instead to call themselves Rwandans?

May 1995—April 1998

IN THE SOUTHERN hill town of Gikongoro, the electricity had failed for the night; the Guest House bar was lit by a half dozen candles, and the eyes of the three soldiers who invited me to drink glowed the color of blood oranges. A single glass of beer was passed, from which I was the last to sip—a ritual signifying that I was not to be poisoned. The soldiers were too drunk for conversation, but a civilian among their party, a man in a shiny black training suit, appeared determined to demonstrate his sobriety. He sat stiffly straight with his arms folded over his chest and his eyes fixed in a hard squint, aloof and appraising. 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. He dropped my hand. His lips bunched up tightly, and he considered me with his humorless stare. Then he said, “I am a pygmy from the jungle. But I learned English from an Anglican bishop.”

He didn’t say his name. The soldier beside me, who had been leaning forward, propped on the upturned barrel of his machine gun, fell suddenly into his own lap, asleep, then jerked awake and smiled and drank some more. The pygmy took no notice. “I have a principle,” he announced. “I believe in the principle of
Homo sapiens.
You get me?”

I took a guess. “You mean that all humanity is one?”

“That is my theory,” the pygmy said. “That is my principle. But I have a problem. I must marry a white woman.”

“Why not?” I said. Then, after a moment, I said, “But why, if we’re all the same? Who cares what color your wife is?”

“She
must
be a white woman,” the pygmy said. “Only a white woman can understand my universal principle of
Homo sapiens.
I must not marry a Negro.” The unalloyed disgust with which he spoke this last word inclined me to agree, for the future wife’s sake. “This is my problem,” he went on. “How am I to attain this goal? You have the opportunity. I have not.” He looked around the dark, nearly empty room and held out an empty hand. A sour look came over him, an atmosphere of accustomed disappointment, and he said, “How am I to meet the white woman? How do I find the white wife?”

The question was not entirely rhetorical. I had entered the bar with a Dutch woman, then lost track of her—she had gone to bed—but she had made an impression; I believe the pygmy wanted me to fix him up. “I have an idea,” he said. “The Netherlands. The bishop, my teacher, had traveled through all the world. To me, the Netherlands is just imagination. But it is real to me.”

I’M TELLING YOU this here, at the outset, because this is a book about how people imagine themselves and one another—a book about how we imagine our world. In Rwanda, a year before I met the pygmy, the government had adopted a new policy, according to which everyone in the country’s Hutu majority group was called upon to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. The government, and an astounding number of its subjects, imagined that by exterminating the Tutsi people they could make the world a better place, and the mass killing had followed.

All at once, as it seemed, something we could have only imagined was upon us—and we could still only imagine it. This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real. During the months of killing in 1994, as I followed the news from Rwanda, and later, when I read that the United Nations had decided, for the first time in its history, that it needed to use the word “genocide” to describe what had happened, I was repeatedly reminded of the moment, near the end of Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness,
when the narrator Marlow is back in Europe, and his aunt, finding him depleted, fusses over his health. “It was not my strength that needed nursing,” Marlow says, “it was my imagination that wanted soothing.”

I took Marlow’s condition on returning from Africa as my point of departure. I wanted to know how Rwandans understood what had happened in their country, and how they were getting on in the aftermath. The word “genocide” and the images of the nameless and numberless dead left too much to the imagination.

I BEGAN VISITING Rwanda in May of 1995, and I hadn’t been there long before I met the pygmy in Gikongoro. I wouldn’t have guessed that he was a pygmy: he was nearly five and a half feet tall. By declaring himself, he seemed to be setting himself apart from the matter of Hutu and Tutsi, and relating to me as a fellow outsider—an observer at large. Still, although he never said a word about the genocide, I came away with the impression that that was the true subject of our exchange. It may have been possible to talk of something else in Rwanda, but I never had a conversation of substance there in which the genocide did not figure, at least quietly, as the point of reference from which all other understandings and misunderstandings stemmed.

So the pygmy spoke of
Homo sapiens
, and I heard a subtext. Pygmies were Rwanda’s first inhabitants, a forest people, who were generally looked down upon by Hutu and Tutsi alike as a vestigial, aboriginal lot. In the precolonial monarchy, pygmies served as court jesters, and because Rwanda’s kings were Tutsis, the memory of this ancestral role meant that during the genocide pygmies were sometimes put to death as royalist tools, while elsewhere they were enlisted by Hutu militias as rapists—to add an extra dash of tribal mockery to the violation of Tutsi women.

Quite likely, the Anglican bishop who had instructed the man I met in the Guest House bar would have regarded the education of such an original savage as a special trophy challenge to the missionary dogma that we are all God’s children. But perhaps the pygmy had learned his lessons too well. Clearly, in his experience, the oneness of humanity was not a fact but, as he kept saying, a theory, a principle—a proposition of the white priest. He had taken this proposition to heart as an invitation, only to discover that it had forbidding limits. In the name of universalism, he had learned to despise the people and the jungle he came from, and to love himself for disdaining that inheritance. Now he had conceived that a white wife was the missing link required to prove his theory, and the improbability of such a match was sorely testing his faith.

I sought to ease the pygmy’s frustration by suggesting that even for white men surrounded by white women—even in the Netherlands—finding a sympathetic mate can prove a great challenge. “I am talking about the African,” he said. “The African is sick.” He managed, for the first time, a twisted little smile.

“There is a novel,” he went on. “The book is
Wuthering Heights.
You get me? This is my larger theory. It doesn’t matter if you are white or yellow or green or a black African Negro. The concept is
Homo sapiens.
The European is at an advanced technological stage, and the African is at a stage of technology that is more primitive. But all humanity must unite together in the struggle against nature. This is the principle of
Wuthering Heights.
This is the mission of
Homo sapiens.
Do you agree?”

I said, “I hear you.”

“Humanity’s struggle to conquer nature,” the pygmy said fondly. “It is the only hope. It is the only way for peace and reconciliation—all humanity one against nature.”

He sat back in his chair, with his arms crossed over his chest, and went silent. After a while, I said, “But humanity is part of nature, too.”

“Exactly,” the pygmy said. “That is exactly the problem.”

Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was lowtech—performed largely by machete—it was carried out at dazzling speed: of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least eight hundred thousand people were killed in just a hundred days. Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they may be right. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Praise for

WE WISH TO INFORM YOU
THAT TOMORROW
WE WILL BE KILLED
WITH OUR FAMILIES

“Young Philip Gourevitch brings us a report from the killing fields of Africa that marks him as a major successor to the handful of great correspondents who have risked life and safety to bring dark truths to a world reluctant to know of them. Like the greatest war reporters, he raises the human banner in hell’s mouth, the insignia of common sense, of quiet moral authority, of blessed humor. He has the mind of a scholar along with the observative capacity of a good novelist, and he writes like an angel. This volume establishes him as the peer of Michael Herr, Ryszard Kapuscinski, and Tobias Wolff. I think there is no limit to what we may expect of him.”

—Robert Stone

“Remarkable …ardent and authoritative …Gourevitch stands alone in his ability to combine an impassioned and informed account of the Rwandan catastrophe with a meditation about what can only be called its spiritual significance.”

—David Rieff,
The New Republic

“A milestone of foreign reporting and a chronicle of evil rarely rivaled since Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness …
[Gourevitch’s] compelling account should be required reading.”

—Jonathan Randal,
The Washington Post Book World

“Stunning …After reading this unforgettable book, it is impossible ever to feel the same again about societies, about human beings, about oneself.”

—Ronald Steel

“Gourevitch’s book ranks among the best examples of the journalism of moral witness.”

—Lance Morrow,
Time

“Riveting.”

—Geoffrey Wheatcroft,
The Wall Street Journal

“A devastating analysis of the makings of genocide, of the inhuman horrors that can spring from political manipulation and perverted mythology. Gourevitch’s book is also a strong indictment of the aloofness, wrong-headedness, and pusillanimity of the so-called great powers, and the international organizations they lead, when dealing with genocide in a small country far away.”