WurfWhile

I have just finished a book I long wanted to read, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch. While I feel the need to re-read the book already, and while my knowledge of African politics is embarrassingly small, the book’s discussion of the Rwandan genocide in the nineties made a dramatic impression. Three thoughts that particularly impressed me: the idea that being able to forget the genocide experience was considered a gift, however unattainable, by survivors; the ideas about “politics” - what political power is, who has “politics” and if a people can be said not to have it; and the role (historic and future) of the international community in African genocide - and how it has so utterly failed in the past (and may well do so in the future). I’ll discuss this all more after I’ve had a chance to gather my thoughts about it.

The timing of this discussion, and the hope for positive action, is all the more poignant given the genocide now occurring in the Sudan among other places in Africa. As an international community, and as the United States, we have not decided to prevent such horrific atrocities, or really even limit them. Perhaps it is not too much, as members of humanity, to start to do more now. If we have been too late too often, surely we can’t start too soon to try to end the extermination of peoples. Surely it can’t be too soon to start today. I am still looking for how to act, although I do plan on at least writing letters, but I do know why.