2014-04-13, 5:26 PM Philip Gourevitch: Remembering the Genocide in Rwanda : The New Yorker

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I
COMMENT
REMEMBERING IN RWANDA
by Philip Gourevitch
APRIL 21, 2014
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n Kigali last week, thousands of mourners trekked
through a thick predawn fog to converge on Amahoro
Stadium. By midmorning, in hot, raking sunshine, they
filled the stands. The Army band, with sousaphones
flashing, marched to the center of the field, arrayed itself
there on a round stage, and began softly playing solemn
hymns. President Paul Kagame arrived, along with a dozen
other sitting and former heads of state from Africa and
Europe. The sky clouded over. The air smelled like rain. A
tall man in a brown suit appeared on the stage. He said that
he was Fidel, a genocide survivor, and he started to tell
how he was supposed to have been killed. Then the
screaming began. The first voice was like a gulls, a series of wild, high keening cries; the next was
lower and slower, strangled with ache, but growing steadily louder in a drawn-out crescendo; after that
came a frantic, full-throated babblinga cascade of terrible, terrified pleading wails.
Every year, at the genocide-commemoration ceremonies during mourning week, scores of
Rwandans erupt in this way, unstrung by grief, convulsed and thrashing when anyone comes near to
2014-04-13, 5:26 PM Philip Gourevitch: Remembering the Genocide in Rwanda : The New Yorker
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soothe or subdue them, including, at the stadium, yellow-vested trauma teams who carry them out,
bucking and still screaming. You can expect it, but you cant protect against it. All around the stadium,
all around the city, all around the country hung misty-gray banners displaying the word kwibuka
remember. The lacerating voices in the stadium make the banners seem almost cruel. Is it really
healing to keep reopening a wound?
A lot of Rwandans will tell you that all through mourning week they are prone to bad and bitter
feelings. For those who were there in 1994, during the genocide, memory can feel like an affliction,
and the greater imperative has often been to learn how to forget enough for long enough to live in the
present for the rest of the year. And for those who were not yet bornmore than half the country today
what does it mean to be told to remember? Many Rwandan schools have yet to teach the history of
the genocide.
The centerpiece of the stadium program was a song-and-dance spectacle, featuring six hundred and
thirty performers in a pop-opera pageant of modern Rwandan history. In the beginning, a harmonious
pre-colonial society is ruptured and polarized by the arrival of white colonizers. Dehumanization
started, the narrator shouts over loud, hard-pulsing music. And humans became objects. The
Rwandans cower and scatter in disarray. Then the killing begins: Denying human dignity, life or death
became the order of the day. And, as the colonizers swap their pith helmets for U.N.-blue berets,
climb into a Land Rover, and roar off, the abandoned Rwandans collapse one by one in an appallingly
realistic spasm of mass death. Against the ensuing tableau of hundreds of lifeless bodies, the pitch of
lamentation in the stadium achieved its most berserk emotion. It was too much, and at the same time it
was wholly inadequate to the reality that it arose from.
The season of slaughter that decimated Rwanda twenty years ago is one of the defining outrages of
humankind. At no other time in the history of our species were so many of us killed so fast or so
intimately: roughly a million people in a hundred days, most of them butchered by hand, by their
neighbors, with household tools and homemade weaponsmachetes and hoes and hammers and clubs.
The killing was programmatic, a campaign prepared and orchestrated by the state to extirpate the Tutsi
minority in the name of an ideology known as Hutu Power. It was, in conception and execution, the
starkest and most comprehensive case of genocide since the crime was defined in international law, in
response to the Holocaust. But, at the time, Rwandans had no word for it.
What we call things is one way we remember them. In Kinyarwanda, the language of the country,
the word gutsemba means to massacre or exterminate, but evidently the killers felt the need for a
stronger expression to capture the intensity of their action and the absoluteness of their purpose. So
they doubled down: they called what they were doing gutsembatsemba. To the Rwandan linguist
variste Ntakirutimana, this redundancy proclaims the limitlessness and the relentlessness of the
2014-04-13, 5:26 PM Philip Gourevitch: Remembering the Genocide in Rwanda : The New Yorker
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slaughter. The social psychologist Assumpta Mugiraneza does not disagree, but to her ear the emphasis
is on the extremity of the slaughter. She says, In Kinyarwanda, we reduplicate the root to underscore
the radical aspect of the action. It describes the movement of coming back and reassuring oneself that
the deed is completed. So gutsembatsemba is to exterminate radically. Of course, the spirit of an
expression is also tonal, and theres a rhythmic punch to gutsembatsemba that caught the world-upside-
down carnival energy of the Hutu Power enterprise. Sometimes, when a pack of killers went on the
attack, they could be heard chanting, Tuzabatsembatsemba, tuzabatsembatsemba: We all will
exterminate you all.
In July of 1994, three months after the killing began, Hutu Power was routed by Kagames
Rwandan Patriotic Front, which has run the country ever since. Soon, the more exact terms
itsembabwoko (to describe the systematic massacre of Tutsis) and itsembatsemba (the killing of anti-
extremist Hutus) gained currency. But some survivors, refusing to echo the killers language so closely,
began speaking of genocide, appropriating the word shared by English and French, Rwandas
secondary languages. They spelled it jenoside, and in 2003 it was codified in the countrys new
constitution. Yet that still wasnt the last word. In 2008, the government once again renamed the crime.
Now they call it the genocide against the Tutsi. Its an inelegant phrase that has been slow to take
hold, perhaps because the foundational idea of Rwandas post-genocide order is to emphasize an
inclusive national identity, and to treat Hutu and Tutsi as distinctions that belong more to the past. We
are all Rwandans now: thats the idea.
At Amahoro Stadium, cheers mixed with the cries as the show continued, with several dozen R.P.F.
soldiers jogging onto the field and tenderly lifting the bodies up, restoring them to life. As the
resurrected Rwandans regrouped center stage, flocks of children joined them, and the music soared.
The nation was made whole again. But the screams did not let up. So there is memory that we manage,
and there is memory that manages us. At the stadium, you had both, and, at times, two decades of
aftermath felt equal to the moment between two heartbeats. !
ILLUSTRATION: TOM BACHTELL
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2014-04-13, 5:26 PM Philip Gourevitch: Remembering the Genocide in Rwanda : The New Yorker
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