The Work of War

Here was a man I was willing to believe had indeed earned his world by making blood gush, eyes widen in terror, arms to reach upward to ward off his machete’s blows or the bullets that sped toward cringing flesh at the press of his karate forefinger. The small rewards were a car with a driver, unlimited beer and liquor, rolls of banknotes by his bedside. The bigger reward was that his strong body and the way he used it had momentarily won him a radical and incomprehensible freedom that lasted those hundred days between April and June 1994. Its potency still lingered in his cocky, controlling air: he exuded the confidence of a man who has little more to see and experience than that which has passed. If they had lost this war, no part of that loss had happened to his method. If he had killed with guns, karate and machetes, all he had killed was well and fluently killed. He had the body language of victory.

Gerard made me aware of how hard it must be to hack and bludgeon people all day long. Genocide, after all, demands the physical fulfilment of a political aim. The more I listened to him, the more it dawned on me that I had encountered a language of labour since I first started reading testimonies and interviewing killers. The driver of the bulldozer may have initially recoiled from his assigned task, but, just as with the gung­ho participation of Gerard, his actions too were tied to the job.

Here was a way I could look at the crowd surrounding Nyange Parish on that fateful day. They had carried work tools as weapons: machetes and garden hoes. Where the Nazis drew on the industrial resources of Germany to build their gas chambers, the Hutu Power ideology of genocide drew on agriculture which is the mainstay of most Rwandans.

Farming is Rwanda’s back­breaking work. A population of ten million people, eighty­five percent of whom directly depend on farming for their livelihoods, share less than a million hectares of cultivated land. Tiny family farms dot every available bit of flat land and have taken over many steep hillsides. The Hutu, who greatly outnumber the Tutsi, form the bulk of those who for generations have risen daily to walk to their plots in the morning chill, machete and hoe in hand. There they prune banana plants, root out weeds and plunge the machete into red soil to deposit maize seeds. Crippling or even fatal hunger is never far off, and so work must go on whether the sun is hot in the sky or a chilly rain is falling. The young work, the motions they make with their tools mimicking those of their elders.

You bend at the waist to work a machete or a hoe. The strong arm swipes from side to side, clearing the obstacle. The forearm wipes at the sweat of the forehead when a moment of respite is taken. The hand grasps at a wooden handle made smooth by constant use. Hard down­stroke, soft flick, short chopping motion, inquisitive pokes, feet apart balanced on a steep slope,arms straining to dig up a root. A thousand motions repeated for months and years from generation to generation. The arms become lean and strong, the stomach is tight with both hunger and muscle, holding the standing body upright and true.

Whether it is clearing a forest for a planting or building a ship, work involves a violent reordering of nature and of materials. Imagine for an instant the physical effects on the earth as our labour levels mountains to build railway tunnels or plunges shafts deep into the earth to extract metals that we melt and bend into a thousand shapes. But even as the worker reshapes the earth, his effort changes him just as profoundly. His gait and posture bend to account for his labours; his social relations are transformed as is the society into which he is born.

In Rwanda, the state’s compulsory conscription for communal labour – a practice established during the colonial and postcolonial period and known as umuganda in Kinyarwanda – became an important foundation in recruiting and deploying groups of killers who approached mass murder in roughly the same way that they had built roads or put up public facilities. This immersion of men with the world as they worked, simultaneously nation­building and nation­cleansing, was key to the aim of group extermination.

The French journalist Jean Hatzfeld has interviewed at length a small group of men who grew up together in the commune of Nyamata, a mostly rural area a half hour drive south of Kigali, and participated in the murder of some fifty thousand Tutsis in the space of a month. Their testimony repeatedly links the project to exterminate the Tutsi with community and duty.

One of the Nyamata gang speaks of using the machete in the marshes where the thousands who did not meet their end at a massacre at the local Catholic parish were hunted.

‘I took up only the machete: first because I had one at the house, second because I knew how to use it. If you are skilled with a tool, it is handy to use it for everything – clearing brush or killing in the swamps. Time allowed everyone to improve in this fashion… whoever struck crooked, or only pretended to strike, we encouraged him, we advised him on improvements. He might also be obliged to take another turn at a Tutsi, in a marsh or in front of a house, and to kill the victim before his colleagues, to make sure he had listened well.’

Skill counted as much as enthusiasm. A witness remembers seeing fathers in Nyamata teaching their sons how to slash Tutsis and then watching the children practice the strokes on dead bodies. Reading these testimonies, it became easier to identify the culmination of such a project, a chopping superman, like Gerard. He was built by the intimate nature of killing linked to the day­to­day patterns of Rwandan life.

The distress at taking the first life or smelling the first rotting corpses would ease with time. The teams of hunters would become more efficient. Their machete skills in the marshes would continue improving and be passed on to the young as was done with the planting of a new crop. The body would become as fluent in the hunting and disposal of the enemy as it was in the farm, while the Tutsi body, hidden, cringing, distorted with pain and then swollen in death would become ever more awkward and ill­fitted to the world. The Hutu Nation was rising from the ashes of old Rwanda; the coming utopia could be glimpsed in this hell, an egalitarian nation, where each man was measured not by degrading founding myths, but by the merit earned by work and sweat in the killing fields.

‘I was doing my job’ turns out to have deeper meanings that reveal a dimension of how ordinary men turned into killers, how the nature and language of work, at first glance the most banal of activities, retains an elastic ability to bear transcendent social and political aims.

One of the Nyamata gang put it plainly to Hatzfeld, ‘Suddenly Hutus of every kind were patriotic brothers. We were through playing around with political words…We were no longer in our each­to­his­own mood. We were doing a job to order.’