We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families Read online

  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.”

  —Sir Brian Urquhart

  “Shocking and important … clear and balanced … the voice in this book is meticulous and humane.”

  —Michael Pearson, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Astonishing … [Gourevitch] is masterful at placing the unspeakability of mass murder into actual peoples’ mouths and inhabiting it in actual peoples’ stories.”

  —Mark Gevisser, Newsday

  “A harsh but elegant moral reckoning.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Thoughtful, beautifully written, and important …we want to pass it along to our friends, and to insist that they read it because the information it contains seems so profoundly essential.”

  —Francine Prose, Elle

  “Extraordinary …rich …Gourevitch is a morally serious writer, and he’s at his very best when listening to ordinary Rwandans, especially the survivors, and trying to make sense of their stories. These voices haunt the book, and they haunt the reader afterward.”

  —George Packer, The Nation

  “Literary journalism at its very best.”

  —John Corry, The American Spectator

  “[An] amazing chronicle … We Wish to Inform You takes the unimaginable and renders it disturbingly, unavoidably real. For that reason alone, this book should be widely read.”

  —Michael Maren, The Village Voice Literary Supplement

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Praise for We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Part Two

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  for my parents

  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.

  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 Nether
lands. 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.”

  Part One

  Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was coming up from the Peiraeus, close to the outer side of the north wall, when he saw some dead bodies lying near the executioner, and he felt a desire to look at them, and at the same time felt disgust at the thought, and tried to turn aside. For some time he fought with himself and put his hand over his eyes, but in the end the desire got the better of him, and opening his eyes wide with his fingers he ran forward to the bodies, saying, “There you are, curse you, have your fill of the lovely spectacle.”

  —PLATO, The Republic

  1

  IN THE PROVINCE of Kibungo, in eastern Rwanda, in the swamp- and pastureland near the Tanzanian border, there’s a rocky hill called Nyarubuye with a church where many Tutsis were slaughtered in mid-April of 1994. A year after the killing I went to Nyarubuye with two Canadian military officers. We flew in a United Nations helicopter, traveling low over the hills in the morning mists, with the banana trees like green starbursts dense over the slopes. The uncut grass blew back as we dropped into the center of the parish schoolyard. A lone soldier materialized with his Kalashnikov, and shook our hands with stiff, shy formality. The Canadians presented the paperwork for our visit, and I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom.

  At least fifty mostly decomposed cadavers covered the floor, wadded in clothing, their belongings strewn about and smashed. Macheted skulls had rolled here and there.

  The dead looked like pictures of the dead. They did not smell. They did not buzz with flies. They had been killed thirteen months earlier, and they hadn’t been moved. Skin stuck here and there over the bones, many of which lay scattered away from the bodies, dismembered by the killers, or by scavengers—birds, dogs, bugs. The more complete figures looked a lot like people, which they were once. A woman in a cloth wrap printed with flowers lay near the door. Her fleshless hip bones were high and her legs slightly spread, and a child’s skeleton extended between them. Her torso was hollowed out. Her ribs and spinal column poked through the rotting cloth. Her head was tipped back and her mouth was open: a strange image—half agony, half repose.

  I had never been among the dead before. What to do? Look? Yes. I wanted to see them, I suppose; I had come to see them—the dead had been left unburied at Nyarubuye for memorial purposes—and there they were, so intimately exposed. I didn’t need to see them. I already knew, and believed, what had happened in Rwanda. Yet looking at the buildings and the bodies, and hearing the silence of the place, with the grand Italianate basilica standing there deserted, and beds of exquisite, decadent, death-fertilized flowers blooming over the corpses, it was still strangely unimaginable. I mean one still had to imagine it.

  Those dead Rwandans will be with me forever, I expect. That was why I had felt compelled to come to Nyarubuye: to be stuck with them—not with their experience, but with the experience of looking at them. They had been killed there, and they were dead there. What else could you really see at first? The Bible bloated with rain lying on top of one corpse or, littered about, the little woven wreaths of thatch which Rwandan women wear as crowns to balance the enormous loads they carry on their heads, and the water gourds, and the
Converse tennis sneaker stuck somehow in a pelvis.

  The soldier with the Kalashnikov—Sergeant Francis of the Rwandese Patriotic Army, a Tutsi whose parents had fled to Uganda with him when he was a boy, after similar but less extensive massacres in the early 1960s, and who had fought his way home in 1994 and found it like this—said that the dead in this room were mostly women who had been raped before being murdered. Sergeant Francis had high, rolling girlish hips, and he walked and stood with his butt stuck out behind him, an oddly purposeful posture, tipped forward, driven. He was, at once, candid and briskly official. His English had the punctilious clip of military drill, and after he told me what I was looking at I looked instead at my feet. The rusty head of a hatchet lay beside them in the dirt.

  A few weeks earlier, in Bukavu, Zaire, in the giant market of a refugee camp that was home to many Rwandan Hutu militiamen, I had watched a man butchering a cow with a machete. He was quite expert at his work, taking big precise strokes that made a sharp hacking noise. The rallying cry to the killers during the genocide was “Do your work!” And I saw that it was work, this butchery; hard work. It took many hacks—two, three, four, five hard hacks—to chop through the cow’s leg. How many hacks to dismember a person?

  Considering the enormity of the task, it is tempting to play with theories of collective madness, mob mania, a fever of hatred erupted into a mass crime of passion, and to imagine the blind orgy of the mob, with each member killing one or two people. But at Nyarubuye, and at thousands of other sites in this tiny country, on the same days of a few months in 1994, hundreds of thousands of Hutus had worked as killers in regular shifts. There was always the next victim, and the next. What sustained them, beyond the frenzy of the first attack, through the plain physical exhaustion and mess of it?