Introduction to ASR Focus

Abstract

Commentaries on Marie Beatrice Umutesi's Surviving the Slaughter Introduction to ASR Focus Marie Beatrice Umutesi. Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire. Translated by Julia Emerson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004 [2000]. in Africa and the Diaspora Series. 259 pp. Acronyms. Chronologies. $19.95. Paper. Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire is a remarkable book by an extraordinary and brave woman, Marie Beatrice Umutesi. Originally published in French as Fuir ou mourir au Zaire: Le vecu d'une refugiee Rwandaise (L'Harmattan, 2000), the book was translated into Dutch, Spanish, and Catalan. The book has now been published in English (translated by Julia Emerson) by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Press as part of its series, Women in Africa and the Diaspora. Umutesi is one of a handful of Rwandans who have published book-length accounts of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath. She writes beautifully, clearly, and with poignancy about the impact of the genocide on ordinary people as they experienced the unfolding of events. What follows this introduction are five commentaries on the book from a variety of perspectives. The world was shaken by the swiftness and magnitude of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda directed primarily against the Tutsi minority and in which close to a million people perished. Little has been written or said of the mass killings that targeted the 1.5 million Hutu refugees who fled to eastern Congo-Kinshasa (then called Zaire). At least three hundred thousand people perished in these massacres as well as from exhaustion, hunger, and illness. The author, Marie Beatrice Umutesi, is a universitytrained woman who was working with women's associations in Byumba, Rwanda. In 1993 Umutesi was forced to flee with tens of thousands of people from Byumba to Kigali as a result of incursions of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) into Rwanda. Then in 1994 after the genocide, as the RPF took over Kigali, she fled to Congo/Zaire with members of her family and several others in the massive exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees. They moved from one refugee camp to another while being pursued by the RPF soldiers. She and other refugees walked, sometimes ran, 2,000 kilometers from Bukavu to Mbandaka through the rain forests of Zaire. They were hunted down, not only by the RPF but also by other marauding armies, and refugees died by the thousands in gruesome attacks by Rwandese forces and from hunger, disease, and exhaustion. They were largely ignored by the international community and betrayed by humanitarian associations, especially the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR). Umutesi eventually made it out of Congo and today lives in exile. By writing this book she has made herself a potential target of those in positions of power who wish to silence her. As Jan Vansina, the renowned historian of central Africa (and professor emeritus of UW-Madison) eloquently put it in a review of the book (2000) : She tells in unadorned, honest, and straightforward language what happened to her and to her companions: what they saw, what they felt, what rumors they heard during their flights or in the camps, their fears, their hopes, their disappointments, their illnesses, deaths, and the horror of it all. This account testifies above all to what humanity itself consists of in its greatness, depravity, and resilience. There are no enemy groups in this book; members of all of them were equally stricken. Vansina calls this a towering work, some of whose pages achieve a surpassing that of any ordinary memoir or testimony. He compares parts to War and Peace and predicts that the book will become a classic: For Umutesi's book is also a literary monument. Her story is an epic for our times, a tale to ponder for the lessons it conveys, testimony so powerful and moving that it reaches an unintended literary greatness (2000:134). …