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.
A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Gourevitch his title. 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. 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. 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.Īn unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. WE WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT TOMORROW WE WILL BE KILLED WITH OUR FAMILIES. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they may be right. Although the killing was lowtech-performed largely by machete-it was carried out at dazzling speed: of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least eight hundred thousand people were killed in just a hundred days. For some time he fought with himself and put his hand over his eyes, but in the end the desire got the better of him, and opening his eyes wide with his fingers he ran forward to the bodies, saying, "There you are, curse you, have your fill of the lovely spectacle."ĭecimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was coming up from the Peiraeus, close to the outer side of the north wall, when he saw some dead bodies lying near the executioner, and he felt a desire to look at them, and at the same time felt disgust at the thought, and tried to turn aside. We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
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