Over the space of a hundred days in 1994 nearly a million Rwandans were murdered by their fellow citizens, and the world refused to stop it. Philip Gourevitch's extraordinary book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families immediately established itself as the great work on its terrible subject.
Now, on the twentieth anniversary of the genocide, Gourevitch has gone back to Rwanda.
You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know explores with great insight and intimacy a society where killers and survivors live again as neighbours, grappling with the burdens of memory and forgetting. He talks to an extraordinary range of Rwandans, from perpetrators and victims in tiny peasant communities, to street kids, businessmen, artists, judges, the national cycle team, the country's revolutionary leaders and their opponents. Gourevitch also revisits the wars of the genocide's aftermath that continue in Congo.
Combining travelogue and investigative reporting, personal narratives and political debates, these stories of life after genocide could not be more urgent or gripping. Gourevitch's moving work is a profound, fiercely beautiful literary reckoning with humanity betrayed and the hard bargains of personal and political forgiveness.
