We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

Author: Philip Gourevitch

Gourevitch chronicles what happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech—largely by machete—it was carried out at shocking speed: Some 800,000 people were exterminated in 100 days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Gourevitch his title.

Gourevitch frames the genesis and horror of Rwanda's "genocidal logic" in the anguish of its aftermath: the mass displacements, the temptations of revenge and the quest for justice, and the impossibly crowded prisons and refugee camps. Through intimate portraits of Rwandans from all walks of life, he focuses on the psychological and political challenges of survival and on how the new leaders of postcolonial Africa went to war in the Congo when resurgent genocidal forces threatened to overrun central Africa.

Paperback

356 pages