Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide, and: Rwanda Means the Universe: A Native's Memoir of Blood and Bloodlines (review)

Scott Straus and Robert Lyons. Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide. New York: Zone Books, 2006. 185 pp. Illustrations. Map. Glossary. $37.95. Cloth. Louise Mushikiwabo and Jack Kramer. Rwanda Means the Universe: A Native's Memoir of Blood and Bloodlines. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006. 384 pp. Map. Photographs. Glossary. Index. $26.95. Cloth. The 1994 Rwandan genocide is among the rare African tragedies that have managed to capture the imagination of the international community. While wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, and Somalia have barely registered in the international consciousness, interest in Rwanda has spawned a cottage industry of publications, making available a much broader spectrum of academic analysis, personal narrative, and heroic mythology than generally is available about events in Africa. The two books reviewed here represent unconventional approaches to the Rwandan genocide that seek to put a human face on the tragedy, and they demonstrate both the benefits and risks of the willingness to publish so comprehensively about Rwanda. Robert Lyons and Scott Straus's innovative Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide combines stark black-and-white photographs of Rwandan people with a collection of interviews with confessed participants in Rwanda's 1994 genocide to create a striking portrayal of the ordinary nature of extreme violence. While so much of the popular depiction of Rwanda's genocide treats the violence as incomprehensible madness, reinforcing racist stereotypes of Africans as fundamentally savage, Lyons and Straus's work goes a long way to humanizing the conflict. The Hutu men interviewed here are not evil madmen involved in a diabolical plot against their Tutsi neighbors. Instead, they are, as Straus writes in his brief but useful introduction to the text, "ordinary husbands, fathers, sons, and boyfriends; they [are] farmers, fishermen, teachers, and market salesmen.... The testimonies in this book reflect the ordinary, unremarkable nature of most of Rwanda's genocide perpetrators" (24). While most of the scholarly work on the Rwandan genocide seeks to explain the national organization of the violence, these interviews help explain the individual motivations of perpetrators. Those interested in a more scholarly analysis of the perpetrator motivations can consult Straus's The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006). Intimate Enemy is valuable for allowing Rwandans to speak for themselves, leaving readers to make their own sense of the violence. The testimonies indicate that while a few participants seem to have been motivated by hatred of the Tutsi, most were in fact driven to kill by a complex combination of fear, obedience, intimidation, and opportunism. Togedier, the testimonies challenge the popular image of the genocide as a spontaneous popular uprising against a hated minority. Instead, they clearly demonstrate the official nature of the violence, referring repeatedly to the intervention of national figures and the active organization of the killing by local authorities. While Straus interviews exclusively genocide perpetrators, Lyons's photographs include both genocide perpetrators and survivors. The majority of Lyons's photographs are portraits, headshots of Rwandans from the neck up, many of them staring directly into the camera. Like those interviewed by Straus, the Rwandans portrayed by Lyons are ordinary people, looking sad, defiant, proud, or humble. What is remarkable about the portraits-and this is undoubtedly Lyons's point-is that one cannot tell without looking at the photo key in the back of the book who is Hutu and who is Tutsi, who is a genocidaire and who is a survivor. Together the interviews and photographs present a deeply affecting portrait of the ordinary nature of violence and of the oft-overlooked humanity of both victims and perpetrators. …