Books

Poetic and deeply moving, “God Sleeps in Rwanda “shows us how the lessons of Rwanda can prevent future tragedies from happening all over the world. Readers will be inspired by the eloquence and wisdom of a man who has every right to be bitter and hateful but chooses instead to live a life of love, compassion, and forgiveness.

While some agree with the current government’s view of history, others greatly disagree, citing that ethnic identities were crafted long before colonial rule. Fegley attempts to add to the scholarly literature by examining the aggregate Rwandan history to address the formation of ethnic identities. Additionally, the author examines how current Rwanda understands its history in terms of national unity and justice after the 1994 genocide.

The author explores the sources of indigenous identification in Africa and its legal and political implications. Noting the limitations of systematic and discursive, as opposed to activist, studies, it questions the appropriateness of this framework in efforts aimed at empowering claimant communities in inherently multiethnic African countries and adopts an interdisciplinary approach in order to capture the indigenous rights phenomenon in Africa.

Focusing on the twentieth century, this collection of essays offers an up-to-date, comprehensive history and analysis of multiple cases of genocide and genocidal acts. The book contains studies of the Armenian genocide; the victims of Stalinist terror; the Holocaust; and Imperial Japan. Contributors explore colonialism and address the fate of the indigenous peoples in Africa, North America, and Australia. In addition, extensive coverage of the post-1945 period includes the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia, Bali, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, East Timor, and Guatemala.

In this epic history of extermination and survival, Timothy Snyder presents a new explanation of the great atrocity of the twentieth century, and reveals the risks that we face in the twenty-first. Based on new sources from eastern Europe and forgotten testimonies from Jewish survivors, Black Earth recounts the mass murder of the Jews as an event that is still close to us, more comprehensible than we would like to think, and thus all the more terrifying.

This book examines the main episodes in the history of genocide from the beginning of human history to the present. Norman lucidly shows that genocide both changes over time, depending on the character of major historical periods, and remains the same in many of its murderous dynamics. He examines cases of genocide as distinct episodes of mass violence, but also in historical connection with earlier episodes. He argues that genocide can also involve the elimination of targeted social and political groups, providing an insightful analysis of communist and anti-communist genocide.

The book is a powerful exploration of the literary response to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. It explores writings from and about witnesses, survivors and perpetrators. It is an interdisciplinary study that will appeal to scholars in French and Francophone Studies and African Studies.

The book is the story of Paul Kagame, a refugee who, after a generation of exile, found his way home. It talks about President Kagame, who strives to make Rwanda the first middle-income country in Africa, in a single generation. In this adventurous tale, learn about Kagame’s early fascination with Che Guevara and James Bond, his years as an intelligence agent, his training in Cuba and the United States, the way he built his secret rebel army, his bloody rebellion, and his outsized ambitions for Rwanda.

In the villages of Nyamata and N’tarama, Hatzfeld interviewed fourteen survivors of the genocide. They speak for those who are no longer alive to speak for themselves; they tell of the deaths of family and friends in the churches and marshes to which they fled, and they attempt to account for the reasons behind the Tutsi extermination. For many of the survivors “life has broken down,” while for others, it has “stopped,” and still others say that it “absolutely must go on.” These voices of courage and resilience exemplify the indomitable human spirit, and they remind us of our own moral responsibility to bear witness to these atrocities and to never forget what can come to pass again.

The book is light in tone, often humorous, and entails almost everything you will meet in terms of challenges and general wonderment when embarking on a surreal journey to Rwanda. It is pretty entertaining. The book is recommended to historians as well as those with an interest in African culture. This book is a must read, especially while travelling to Rwanda with a desire to explore.

In 1996, Clea Koff, a 23-year-old graduate student was sent to Rwanda by the U.N. to work with a small team exhuming victims of the genocide against the Tutsi. The book is a mesmerizing account of her four years of gruelling investigations into these, and other, murderous events – what she found in the Rwandan hills and in Srebrenica; how it affected her; and who went to trial based on evidence she collected – events which transformed her from an idealistic student to a war crimes veteran.

The author does not deny the importance of ethnicity in the genocide against the Tutsi, but he finds that it operated more as a background condition. Instead, he emphasizes fear and intra-ethnic intimidation as the primary drivers of the violence. A defensive civil war and the assassination of a president created a feeling of acute insecurity. In conclusion, Straus steps back from the particulars of the genocide against the Tutsi to offer a new, dynamic model for understanding other instances of genocide in recent history—the Holocaust, Armenia, Cambodia, the Balkans—and assessing the future likelihood of such events.

Based on personal interviews and thorough research, the book returns to the boundary lines of genocide’s wounds and traces the route of reconciliation in the lives of Rwandans—victims, widows, orphans, and perpetrators—whose past and future intersect. We find in these stories how suffering, memory, and identity set up roadblocks to forgiveness, while mediation, truth-telling, restitution, and interdependence create bridges to healing.

The book reveals the extent of the planning of the genocide and its progress country-wide. The book contains the first comprehensive reconstruction of the genocide together with exclusive information about French foreign policy towards Rwanda – the role of its intelligence services and its mercenaries. The author had unique access to files and records that were abandoned by the genocidaires, many of these documents from the previous regime’s department of military intelligence. These documents give a unique insight into the minds of the conspirators and how they determined that genocide and the racist policy that underpinned it should become a part of government policy.

When President Habyarimana’s jet was shot down in April 1994, Rwanda erupted into a hundred-day orgy of killing – which left up to a million dead. Fergal Keane travelled through the country as the genocide was continuing, and his powerful analysis reveals the terrible truth behind the headlines.

The book examines the decade (1986-97) that brackets the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. This collection of essays is both a narrative of that event and a deep re-examination of the international role in addressing humanitarian issues and complex emergencies. It offers readers a perspective in sharp contrast to the tendency to treat a peace agreement as the end to conflict. This is a detailed effort to make sense of the political crisis, the genocide against the Tutsi and the effects it had on its neighbours.

The author tells the compelling story of what happened during the genocide against the Tutsi. She holds governments to account, showing how individuals could have prevented what was happening and didn’t do so. The book also reveals the unrecognised heroism of those who stayed on during the genocide, volunteer peacekeepers and those who ran emergency medical care. This new edition examines the ongoing impact of the 1948 Genocide Convention and the shock waves Rwanda caused around the world.

Jean Patrick dreams of running in the Olympics, and with gruelling training he soon beats a world qualifying time. But his chances of success are threatened by the ethnic tensions erupting all around him. When Hutu violence against Tutsis finally crescendos and his homeland Rwanda is wracked by unforgivable atrocities, Jean Patrick, a Tutsi, has no choice but to run for his life abandoning fatherland, family, and the woman he loves. Finding them again will be the race of his life.

The book concerns Hutu/Tutsi politics and violence since 1959. This emphasis tends to obscure the roots of the problem in the colonial period. Aimable accurately stresses that the Hutu, Tutsi (and Twa) share language, religion, and space, with their identities having been somewhat flexible and based on unequal status. He discusses the European colonials’ racial stereotypes but does not specify the profound impact of European “scientific” racism, which assumed that Tutsi and Hutu were different “races,” with the Hutu born to be forever inferior.

Blessed with natural beauty and rich vegetation, Rwanda is often called the “land of a thousand hills”. Rwandans possess a centric view of the world, believing that God favors Rwanda and that Rwanda means “the universe.” However, this idyllic view of Rwanda sharply contrasts with the sad history of ethnic strife that has unfolded in the country since the 1950s and in 1994. This book through its chronology, introductory essays, appendixes, maps, bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on important persons, places, events, and institutions and significant political, economic, social, and cultural aspects, provides an important reference on this central African country.

Revolutions are often seen in terms of a spontaneous burst of intense political activity; less attention usually is given to the structures, processes, and perceptions that make such activity possible. This innovative book examines such long-term transformations as they relate to the revolution in the Central African nation of Rwanda, which culminated in its independence in July 1962. It explores the interaction of central and local power bases and delineates the transformations introduced into the system by German and Belgian colonial policies that consciously sought to bolster one ethnic group as agents of colonial administration.

A Rwandan proverb says “Defeat is the only bad news.” For Rwandans living under colonial rule, winning called not only for armed confrontation, but also for a battle of wits—and not only with foreigners, but also with each other. Alison recounts the ambitions, strategies, and intrigues of an African royal court under Yuhi Musinga, the Rwandan ruler from 1896 to 1931. These were turbulent years for Rwanda, when first Germany and then Belgium pursued an aggressive plan of colonization there.

Based on interviews carried out for doctoral research in Rwanda 1998 and in Europe 1999, Nigel Eltringham deals with the discourse on responsibility for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and on the binary construction of Rwandan society. He focuses on six debates that prove to be crucial for the understanding of how absolutist ways of picturing Rwandan society made the genocide possible, and he dedicates a chapter to each of these debates.

This book is a unique account of the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative in Rwanda in the mid-1990s. Shaharyar M. Khan’s tenure began in the immediate aftermath of the downing of President Habarimana’s plane on April 6, 1994 and the massacres that followed. Khan details his encounters with soldiers and politicians, victims and survivors, perpetrators of the massacres, and humanitarian relief efforts. This book reveals how the UN works on the ground and at headquarters.

Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when the genocide against the Tutsi took place. She shares her story from then until when she found asylum in the United States. Raw, urgent, yet disarmingly beautiful, The Girl Who Smiled Beads captures the true costs and aftershocks of war: what is forever lost, what can be repaired, the fragility and importance of memory, the faith that one can learn, again, to love oneself, even with deep scars.

The book is a major artistic contribution to the study of the history and effects of genocide. The scripts deal with the destruction of four targeted populations: Armenians in Lorne Shirinian’s Exile in the Cradle, Cambodians in Catherine Filloux’s Silence of God, Bosnian Muslims in Kitty Felde’s A Patch of Earth, and Rwandan Tutsis in Erik Ehn’s Maria Kizito. Taken together, these four plays erase the boundaries of theatrical realism to present stories that probe the actions of the perpetrators and the suffering of their victims.

As a foreign correspondent, Scott witnessed firsthand Somalia’s descent into war and its battle against US troops, the spiritual degeneration of Sudan’s Holy War, and one of the most horrific events of the last half century: the genocide in Rwanda. He brings these events together for the first time to record a collapse that has had an impact far beyond African borders. Filled with the dust, sweat and powerful detail of real-life, the book graphically illustrates how preventive action and a better understanding of Africa – especially by the US – could have averted much suffering.

The book represents a unique blend of political and legal theory, one that focuses on the double-edged role of memory in fueling cycles of hatred and maintaining justice and personal integrity. Its centerpiece comprises three penetrating essays by Minow. She argues that innovative legal institutions and practices, such as truth commissions and civil damage actions against groups that sponsor hate, often work better than more conventional criminal proceedings and sanctions. Minow also calls for more sustained attention to the underlying dynamics of violence.

The author shares his life struggles, how he commemorated his lost family and the way they died, searching if any relatives survived, and working to earn everyday life. This struggle took long but as time went on, he started gaining hope for the future. First, he started thinking beyond himself, then about helping his fellow genocide survivors and contributing to the reconstruction of the country. His belief in God generated love and brought him to forgive people who killed his family.

The author shares her own experience of her country’s past. She starts her memoir with her idyllic childhood in the Land of a Thousand Hills with her large, happy family before the genocide; but soon, their own Hutu-led government and military turns against them when she is pregnant. Henriette must endure the Rwandan Genocide as a Tutsi woman, and protect her family in the process. Witnessing her family’s degradation and experiencing her own torture, she finds strength in God to continue fighting for her and her unborn daughter’s lives.

Ubumwe bw’Abanyarwanda mu mateka yabo. Igice cya mbere: Ubukoroni n’Mcakubiri mu Rwanda.
Muri iki gitabo, umwanditsi agaragaza imibanire y’Abanyarwanda mbere y’uko abazungu baza mu Rwanda, uko iyo mibanire myiza yaje kugenda ihinduka mibi buhoro buhoro bitewe n’imiyoborere mibi y’ubukoroni ndetse n’uburyo Abatutsi batangiye kwirukanwa mu Rwanda. Iki gitabo gisoza kivuga uko abakoroni basizeho Repubulika ya mbere yagombaga gukomeza gukora ku nyungu zabo.

The narrative takes the reader on a journey from the days the world and Rwanda discovered each other back to colonial period when pseudoscientific ideas about race put the nation on a highway bound for the 1994 genocide. Urged on by the desire to find a letter her brother sent her, Mushikiwabo rummages into their farm childhood, and into family corners alternately dark, loving, and humorous. She searches for stray mementos of the lost, then for their roots. What she finds is that and more—hints, roots, of the 1994 crime that killed her family.

This book shares the story ofAnglican Bishop John Rucyahana; having members of his church and family butchered. John refused to become a part of the systemic hatred. He founded the Sonrise orphanage and school for children orphaned in the genocide, and he now leads reconciliation efforts between his own Tutsi people, the victims of this horrific massacre, and the perpetrators, the Hutus.

In Rwanda, 1973 to 1994 the Catholic and Protestant leaders entered into close political relations with the regime of the MRND (Mouvement Revolutionnaire National pour le Developpement), which alienated them from the people of Rwanda when human rights abuses were widespread, culminating in the war in 1990 and the genocide of 1994. If the church’s mission remains that of teaching and evidencing love, justice and righteousness, there is need for it to confess and repent of its failures and complicity in the tragedies.

This edited volume sets out to unravel various dimensions of a particular topical question pertaining to minorities and minority protection, which has not been explored yet, more particularly the socio-economic participation of minorities in relation to their right to (respect for) identity. This interrelation and interaction is studied from a multi-disciplinary perspective, spanning a broad range of disciplines, while drawing on a rich variety of case studies covering various corners of the world.

Fujii argues that ethnic hatred and fear do not satisfactorily explain the mobilization of Rwandans one against another. Fujii’s extensive interviews in Rwandan prisons and two rural communities form the basis for her claim that mass participation in the genocide was not the result of ethnic antagonisms. Rather, the social context of action was critical. Strong group dynamics and established local ties shaped patterns of recruitment for and participation in the genocide.

Scott Straus seeks to explain why and how genocide takes place—and, perhaps more important, how it has been avoided in places where it may have seemed likely or even inevitable. To solve that puzzle, he examines postcolonial Africa, analyzing countries in which genocide occurred and where it could have but did not. Why have there not been other Rwandas? Straus finds that deep-rooted ideologies—how leaders make their nations—shape strategies of violence and are central to what leads to or away from genocide. Other critical factors include the dynamics of war, the role of restraint, and the interaction between national and local actors in the staging of campaigns of large-scale violence.

Why did Rwanda’s rural Hutus participate so massively, and so personally, in the country’s 1994 genocide of its Tutsi population? Given all that has been written already about this horrific episode, is there still more that can be learned? Answering these questions, Jean-Paul Kimonyo’s social and economic history explores at the deepest level the role both of power relations among Rwanda’s grassroots citizens, political parties, and the state and of socioeconomic factors vs. politically/socially constructed ethnicity.

Le livre analyse les relations entre les mémoires et l’histoire scolaire du Rwanda. L’auteur étudie sept thèmes présentes comme conflictuels dans l’historiographie rwandaise. La manière dont ces thèmes sont présentes dans les manuels d’histoire utilises entre 1962 et 1994 ainsi que les conceptions qu’en ont des Rwandais ayant été, ou non, scolarises constituent la charpente de l’ouvrage. Les resultats de recherches montrent de nombreuses convergences entre les contenus des manuels scolaires et les souvenirs des Rwandais interviewes lors de l’enquête.