The Work of War

There is nothing as quotidian as work; no rhythm is more set in our lives. Work is so common that it is rendered invisible. In many testimonies by Rwanda’s genocidaires, dozens of whom I interviewed in prisons for my doctoral research, the killing is described as work and the genocide as a war. I wanted to find out why they had killed, how they had done it and what they felt about it a decade later. I expected to find wrecks of men, haunted, wasting away from guilt. There may have been some who were in such a dire state, but none of those I met. Instead, what I encountered in many cases was a confident assertion that what they had done was inevitable: that they were themselves victims of an unfortunate war between the Hutu and the Tutsi. They told of orders, devil possession, the mesmeric effects of a radio station that urged on the killing, the suspicion that the victims were part of a sinister plot to kill all Hutus. Some joked easily with me about prison, others held my hand for long minutes as we stood on the porch of the small office I used for my interviews. I knew they were murderers, I had read prosecution files and spoken to witnesses, but none of this brought me any closer to understanding what had happened at Nyange Parish or the hundreds of other killing grounds. Work, war, orders, these words seemed a faint shadow of the images I had seen on television a decade before I came to Rwanda.

I had been a student in the United States in early April 1994 when CNN journalist Gary Strieker’s voice described the footage of a rushing, brown river choked with hundreds, thousands, of hacked up, swelling Tutsi bodies. Roadsides and churches and towns full of the rotting dead were jostling and losing headline space to the suicide of a famous American grunge singer. Three weeks later, they would again play second fiddle, this time to South Africa’s first multi­racial elections. I was the only African in the dormitory television room and so, as was usual with all the many puzzles that Africa threw at my dorm­mates’ innocence, they turned to me for an explanation of Rwanda’s tragedy as April came to an end and newspaper stories kept up a steady count of the accumulating corpses. My defensive, Panafricanist responses to their questions rang hollow even to me. It may have been true that the gruesome drama was the result of neo­colonialism, the Cold War and its support of murderous dictators, the false consciousness of nationalism, the colonial hangover, privatisation and globalisation. But my tongue was stilled. Cameras followed the river of bodies and showed Ugandan fishermen in Lake Victoria pulling swollen corpses into their boats. Young men at hastily erected roadblocks of boulders and felled trees, brandished the machetes they had used to chop down the bodies that lay at their feet.

Experts assembled in studios around the world to explain this catastrophe, wrote of an age­old hatred between Hutus and Tutsis, overpopulation, collapsed coffee prices, lack of education, a culture of obedience. The most common characterisation was that Rwanda was in chaos. The violence was depicted as orgiastic and savage. But mass murder, as I would learn, is an undertaking that demands order. The killers organised themselves on roadblock duty, they joined patrols and search parties, they coordinated their killing action and innovated new ways to find and destroy Tutsis.

Years passed and I went to work for a hedge fund. The market made sense of the world. Our Manhattan trading desk was part of a flat world that American columnists told us was here to stay. Bodies in rivers and churches surrounded by killer farmers were far away, they faded with the passing months and years. Then, one morning on the way to work, I emerged from a New York subway train onto a pavement filled with people looking skywards. Planes commandeered by men using small blades meant for office work had crushed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Three thousand people died. America responded by gathering all the jets and bombs and powers of the Western world to wage war against a small group of men hiding in Afghanistan’s caves. Rwanda awakened in my imagination again. I turned to it and saw that other men with blades, the Hutu genocidaires of old, had sparked a war of seven African countries in Congo.

They had been chased out of Rwanda by an army of Tutsi refugees whose invasion of Congo set off a domino effect of wars and insurgencies that continue to this day. The Rwandan genocidaires maintained their campaign to exterminate all Tutsi peoples, whether they lived in Rwanda or in Eastern Congo. The graves filled up fast as militias and militaries tried to prove their ruthlessness by massacring civilians associated with their enemies. The same assembly of experts from 1994reachedfortheirmicrophonesandpenned headlines. ‘UN SUSUPENDS INVESTIGATION OF ALLEGED CONGO MASSACRES.’ ‘REBELS “EATING PYGMIES” AS MASS SLAUGHTER CONTINUES IN CONGO.’

Men with machetes determined what streams of bodies flowed into rivers and what buildings remained standing. They showed no half­heartedness, no haplessness. Their zeal had nothing to do with me or anything I knew. It was ready to cut millions to death, to be witnessed doing so, and to proceed with little trouble. And for me, life could not go on as it had before. To knot my tie every morning and take the same train to the same airless office felt increasingly absurd as the weeks went by. I needed to know, to delve as deeply as I could manage into this violence and its politics. Quitting was easy.