In April 1994, when South Africa was celebrating the end of apartheid with the election of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress to power, Rwanda, a tiny central African state was awash with the blood of one of its ethnic minorities, the Tutsis. In 100 days, from April to early July 1994, the country’s Hutu paramilitary, Interahamwe (‘We who strike together’), fattened and armed by its deceased president, Habyarimana, butchered about one million Tutsis. The world chose to look the other way. As the Reuters photojournalist Corinne Dufka put it in her address to the UCLA International Institute on the tenth anniversary of the genocide: ‘[T]here were thousands of journalists on the African continent during the genocide, but they were almost all in South Africa covering the elections.’[7] The United States, already suffering from Somalia fatigue, refused to name the massacres ‘genocide’ for fear it would have to intervene once again in accordance with the Geneva Convention. The UN Peacekeeping force present in Rwanda at the time refused to exceed its brief — that of ‘keeping peace’ — and engage in armed conflict with the genocidal Hutu paramilitary. As the fictional UN General put it in Gil Courtemanche’s novel, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, ‘I would like to protect civilians, but I do not want to risk losing soldiers, even one, without written authorisation. I am not here to save Rwandans. I’m here to respect the Arusha accord.’[8]
When Corinne Dufka implored her editors to allow her to cover the Rwandan massacres as well as the South African elections, they told her that the public had little appetite for seeing dead bodies in the morning newspaper. They finally allowed her to travel to Rwanda, though, after seeing a particular photograph that caught their interest. The photograph was not of the genocide, but of a massive exodus of refugees from Rwanda into neighbouring Tanzania. ‘They finally said, “This looks impressive. You can go.”’ Dufka and her team chose a route to Rwanda from the southeast, passing through Tanzania and Burundi. Their assignment was to cover the refugee story. Dufka describes the gruesome tableau that lay before them:
There was a river that flowed between Tanzania and Rwanda. There was a large waterfall and there were bodies flowing over it. On the one hand there were refugees going into Tanzania and on the other hand we had these bloated bodies every couple of minutes flowing over this waterfall. It was horrific.
Dufka also gives a graphic description of her experience of visiting churches and schools where many Tutsis sought refuge and were massacred:
You could see the story of the chase in the ways the bodies fell. In one of them I remember seeing a dead mother and her two dead children. You could see she was trying to protect her children and you could see she was huddled over these children — they’d been dead for a number of weeks and you could see the machete marks on her body where the bone was shattered.[9]
The reason why Dufka could still see mounds of hacked bodies was the astonishing decision taken by the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), which took over the country soon after the genocide, to leave the corpses where they lay, between the church pews, beneath the school desks, in the yard outside. In the words of Michael Ignatieff, who witnessed the grim memorialisation a year later in the company of the then UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, ‘The survivors turned the church compound at Nyarubuye into the Yad Vashem of African genocide’.[10] This is how Ignatieff describes the scene:
Stretched out on the floor are row upon row of dust-coloured skeletons in rags. A dirty light slants across femurs, ankles, hipbones, shoulderjoints, teeth, skulls. No flesh remains. There’s no smell of putrefaction. The clothing has faded to the colour of ash. Boutros-Ghali shuts his eyes and quietly mutters, ‘Everywhere we work, we are struggling against a culture of death.’[11]
The decade since has witnessed a proliferation of creative representations of this meticulously choreographed genocide in multiple media — in fiction, memoirs, feature films, documentaries, performances and art exhibitions. Some of these creative works include Terry George’s feature film Hotel Rwanda, Gil Courtemanche’s docu-fiction A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, Andrew Miller’s novel The Optimists, Veronique Tadjo’s memoir The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda, and many powerful documentaries. Two of the most memorable are the UN General Romeo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil, and Michael Caton-Jones and David Belton’s Shooting Dogs. There was also a sculpture exhibition at the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the genocide, in which an artist from Ghana, Kofi Setordji, displayed his installation of wooden sculpture and terracotta masks marking the event. The exhibition later travelled to Kigali in April 2004.
In October 2005, the Sydney Opera House staged a Senegalese dance performance entitled Fagaala (‘genocide’ in Senegalese) choreographed by the acclaimed Senegalese performer Germaine Acogny and the Japanese butoh master Kota Yamasaki. A leading performer in the African art world, Acogny was inspired to create this dance ensemble after reading a fictional account of the genocide by the Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop. In contrast to the mediatised, byte-sized coverage of the killings on television, Diop’s novel Murambi: The Book of Remains ‘humanised’ the genocide for Acogny to such an extent that she could not rest till she, as an African creative artist, enacted this horror through dance and used her art to converse with the world. ‘This fiction’, she said, ‘was more real than reality. I saw myself in the story. I was the killer and the victim. As a black African woman and artist, I took the responsibility to speak.’[12] Acogny here addresses a critical link between trauma aesthetics and humanist ethics that is the substance of this paper.