Blood Papa
Rwanda's New Generation
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
The continuation of a groundbreaking study of the Rwandan genocide, and the story of the survivor generation
In Rwanda from April to June 1994, 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by their Hutu neighbors in the largest and swiftest genocide since World War II. In his previous books, Jean Hatzfeld has documented the lives of the killers and victims, but after twenty years he has found that the enormity of understanding doesn’t stop with one generation. In Blood Papa, Hatzfeld returns to the hills and marshes of Nyamata to ask what has become of the children—those who never saw the machetes yet have grown up in the shadow of tragedy.
Fabrice, Sandra, Jean-Pierre, and others share the genocide as a common inheritance. Some have known only their parents’ silence and lies, enduring the harassment of classmates or the stigma of a father jailed for unspeakable crimes. Others have enjoyed a loving home and the sympathies offered to survivor children, but do so without parents or an extended family.
The young Rwandans in Blood Papa see each other in the neighborhood—they dance and gossip, frequent the same cafés, and, like teenagers everywhere, love sports, music, and fashion; they surf the Web and dream of marriage. Yet Hutu and Tutsi children rarely speak of the ghosts that haunt their lives. Here their moving first-person accounts combined with Hatzfeld’s arresting chronicles of everyday life form a testament to survival in a country devastated by the terrible crimes and trauma of the past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
French journalist Hatzfeld (The Antelope's Strategy), who has authored three previous books about the 1994 Rwandan genocide the planned slaughter of more than 800,000 members of the Tutsi ethnic group by Hutu political elites investigates the legacy of those massacres to powerful effect. He interviews young adults from Nyamata district who were either too young at the time to remember the events or who were born in the years following, and some of their parents and teachers. Surprisingly, the offspring of the Hutu genocidists appear to have suffered more deeply than those of the Tutsi survivors, according to Hatzfeld: Tutsi children receive educational stipends from the government, which has led to unequal opportunities, and the killers' children feel deep shame. "We pay for sins we didn't commit," laments the daughter of one Hutu prisoner. Despite, or perhaps because of, the government's prohibition on talk of ethnicity, "deep down, a lot of young people from both ethnicities conceal a desire for revenge," admits the daughter of a Tutsi survivor. This book, more of an ethnography than a history, exposes the effects of the genocide's stubborn legacy on the next generation, but is not an introduction to the events of 1994. Readers approaching it without prior knowledge of the genocide or Hutu-Tutsi relations will have a hard time fully understanding it, but those who have context will find this an illuminating update.
