Rwanda will begin commemorating 30 years on Sunday since the 1994 genocide that left 800,000 people dead, most of them from the Tutsi ethnic minority. For three decades, researchers have been investigating what happened, carefully detailing accounts from the witnesses and survivors of the last mass slaughter of the 20th century.
In just 100 days, more than 800,000 people were massacred in Rwanda beginning on April 7, 1994. For three months, Hutu forces – including the army, Interahamwe militias and ordinary citizens – used guns, machetes and clubs to kill fellow Rwandans. Although most of the victims were Tutsis, who were referred to as “inyenzi” (“cockroaches” in the Kinyarwanda language) by their assassins, Hutus were also killed.
The carnage began the day after Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down with surface-to-air missiles over the capital, Kigali. The Hutu president’s death gave rise to a frenzy of hatred, fuelled by virulent anti-Tutsi propaganda. Almost as soon as it was over, historians began to study how events unfolded. In the months that followed the first historical accounts were published, aimed at deciphering the genesis and perpetration of the last genocide of the 20th century.
This kind of immediate empirical approach to historic events already had a long tradition, according to Rwandan historian Raphael Nkaka. “Raphael Lemkin published his ‘Axis Rule in Occupied Europe’ in 1944, in which he defended the term ‘genocide’, which he had himself just coined, at the very moment when genocide was being perpetrated against the Jews,” Nkaka notes.
Moreover, politician and playwright Antoine-Vincent Arnault had “published a political and military life of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1822, a year after the emperor’s death”.
‘An emotional shock’
Nkaka, a professor at the University of Rwanda, has spent 30 years analysing the history of racism and racial policies in his country from the early 20th century up to the Tutsi genocide; his 2013 doctoral thesis focused on “the hold of racial logic on Rwandan society from 1894 to 1994”.
During the events of 1994, he was in the area controlled by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the Tutsi rebel group led by Paul Kagame, now president of Rwanda. A Tutsi himself, Nkaka had fled the violence perpetrated in 1991 against members of the Bagogwe Tutsi community. His two sisters, their husbands and children, as well as cousins were killed during the genocide.
Despite having lived through such traumatic events, Nkaka believes that his origins did not influence the direction of his scholarly work. “Being Tutsi is not of primary importance. It’s a socio-political construct that only has meaning when competing for political power. It’s an identity exploited for the conquest or loss of this power. So it has no influence on the quality of research,” he says.
Nkaka has been teaching history since 1987, and notes that he began his vocation long before the massacres that befell his country. “The work I did after the genocide is a continual improvement on, not a break with, what I did before 1994.”
For his French colleague Hélène Dumas, however, the crimes in Rwanda were a turning point in her personal life. She visited the country for the first time in 2004 to mark the 10th anniversary of the genocide. “It was a study trip, but I had no intention of becoming a historian. It was the subject that chose me. I felt an emotional shock when I discovered the traces of the genocide that remained. That was the catalyst for my investigation.”
Meeting the witnesses to genocide
Dumas, a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), has over the past 20 years become one of the leading authorities on the history of the Rwandan genocide. Her 2014 book on the killings – Le Génocide au village. Le massacre des Tutsi au Rwanda (Genocide in the village. The massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda) – was based on research carried out in a Rwandan village and brought her face-to-face with aspects of a horrific level of violence.
Her experience left a profound mark. “I work on both written and oral sources. But it’s not at all the same thing to receive the testimony from someone who has been through this scarcely imaginable experience. When someone tells you they spent 14 days hiding in a latrine without eating, it’s not the same as reading about it,” she says.
After two decades immersed in archives and witness testimony, she admits it is often difficult to put emotions aside. “When you’re working on a subject like this, feigning total detachment would almost be like lying,” she says. “When you’re interviewing people, they can sense very well if you’re empathetic.”
Dumas was particularly struck by the fate of the youngest victims of the 1994 massacres. For a 2020 book she looked at notebooks written by children and adolescent survivors (Sans ciel ni terre. Paroles orphelines du génocide des Tutsi or Without heaven or Earth. Words from orphans of the Tutsi genocide).
“It’s not just because they represent a somewhat iconic figure of innocence, but also because children are the prime target of a genocidal policy. This is the criterion that distinguishes genocide from any other manifestation of violence.”
In the face of such horror, Dumas was moved by those who were “rescuers” – the Hutus who helped Tutsis escape.
“We must emphasise the role of these people, who demonstrated humanity and showed through their actions and commitment that a choice was possible.”
Exploring scientific fields
Different approaches shed light on various aspects of the mass violence of 30 years ago. And work continues to complete the historical record. In France, a commission of historians set up by President Emmanuel Macron concluded in 2021 that the French state, which had close relations with the Hutu regime when the genocide began, bore “heavy and damning responsibilities” while also ruling out complicity.
More recently, the NGO Human Rights Watch on Tuesday announced the publication of previously unpublished archives documenting the extraordinary efforts of human rights defenders, in Rwanda and abroad, to raise the alarm about the genocide in 1994 and stop the massacres.
At the University of Rwanda, Nkaka continues to analyse the roots of the genocide. “There are still scientific fields to be studied, such as the weaponisation of Hutu, Tutsi and Twa identities during the colonial period,” he notes.
Dumas agrees. “There is a lot to be done in the colonial archives. There are still a lot of unexplored archives. There’s work for decades to come.”
But for her the biggest question that remains is how history is passed on. “There’s going to be a new generation of teachers who didn’t experience the genocide. How are they going to teach this history?”
Today, more than 70% of Rwanda’s 13 million inhabitants are age 30 or under. The country is seeking to free itself from the weight of the past while also commemorating what happened.
For Dumas, it is time to “decompartmentalise the history of the Tutsi genocide, to make it part of the larger international history of 20th-century genocides”.
This article has been translated from the original in French.
