a book
We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families
Philip Gourevitch · 1998 · 368 pages
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families is the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
An unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity.
This remarkable debut book from Philip Gourevitch chronicles what has 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 a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Gourevitch his title.
With keen dramatic intensity, 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, the impossibly crowded prisons and refugee camps. Through intimate portraits of Rwandans in 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.
Can a country composed largely of perpetrators and victims create a cohesive national society? This moving contribution to the literature of witness tells us much about the struggle everywhere to forge sane, habitable political orders, and about the stubbornness of the human spirit in a world of extremity.
recommended by 6 people
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Lisa Ling
“If you want to know why the genocide in Rwanda happened in 1994, this is a must-read. This meticulously account is told from both the Hutu and Tutsi perspectives and is impressively comprehensive. It is so well told, in fact, that I felt like I was there experiencing the horror with my own eyes.”↗
Mia Farrow
“Philip Gourevitch has written a riveting book about the Rwandan genocide and the title is part of a note to his pastor from a man who knew he was going to be killed the next day. This book examines the darkest side of human beings. As the mother of many children, including seven sons I realise the importance of bringing up my sons to find peaceful resolutions to conflict – the reality is that it is men who are the violent perpetrators. This killing component is very likely responsible for the survival of the human species over many, many centuries. But now our weaponry has succeeded our wisdom and we have not evolved away from the brutality that was useful to early human beings.”↗
Errol Morris
“DENOUNCING v. EXAMINING EVIL. I'm reminded of a line from Philip Gourevitch's great book, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families."...the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good."”↗
Ben Affleck
“This is an extraordinary account of a Western journalist trying to find answers in Rwanda in the years following the genocide. Yearning, peripatetic, and deeply accessible, it gave me an entrée into this monstrous event. Gourevitch finds a very human path through the wreckage of an inhuman event. Riding in his wake, I felt as though I started to know a place I had never been. As soon as I finished the last page, I wanted to know more.”↗
