#Fiston Mudacumura

[t0rschlusspan1k]

In occasion of the 30th anniversary from the Rwandan genocide I couldn't refrain from presenting you with this book I read a couple of years ago. It's a memoir/report by Clea Koff, a forensic anthropologist, who worked on the mass graves of the most important massacres in recent history: Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo.

From Penguin Random House Canada:

Published ten years after the genocide in Rwanda, The Bone Woman is a riveting, deeply personal account by a forensic anthropologist sent on seven missions by the UN War Crimes Tribunal. To prosecute charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, the UN needs proof that the bodies found are those of non-combatants. This means answering two questions: who the victims were, and how they were killed. The only people who can answer both these questions are forensic anthropologists. Before being sent to Rwanda in 1996, Clea Koff was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student studying prehistoric skeletons in the safe confines of Berkeley, California. Over the next four years, her gruelling investigation into events that shocked the world transformed her from a wide-eyed student into a soul-weary veteran — and a wise and deeply thoughtful woman. Her unflinching account of those years — what she saw, how it affected her, who went to trial based on evidence she collected — makes for an unforgettable read, alternately riveting, frightening and miraculously hopeful. Readers join Koff as she comes face to face with the human meaning of genocide: exhuming almost five hundred bodies from a single grave in Kibuye, Rwanda; uncovering the wire-bound wrists of Srebrenica massacre victims in Bosnia; disinterring the body of a young man in southwestern Kosovo as his grandfather looks on in silence. As she recounts the fascinating details of her work, the hellish working conditions, the bureaucracy of the UN, and the heartbreak of survivors, Koff imbues her story with an immense sense of hope, humanity and justice.

I also recommend you watch the video and read the articles and posts I shared earlier on my blog to better understand how this horror came to be:

Rwanda: From colonialism to genocide (documentary + article)

Emmanuel Macron's declarations

Some other book recommendations:

[FR] Maria Malagardis, "Avant la nuit"

[FR] Dorcy Rugamba, "Hewa Rwanda: Lettre aux absents"

Fiston Mudacumura, "Born Hutsi: My Imbroglio"

Thank you for your attention.