We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
Philip Gourevitch
The title comes from a letter Tutsi pastors wrote before they were killed.
Gourevitch reconstructs the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, in which roughly 800,000 people were killed in about a hundred days. Through interviews with survivors and perpetrators, he examines how the killing was organized by the state and how the wider world declined to intervene. The book brought the genocide to a broad readership with unusual moral seriousness, and it became one of the best-known accounts of both the atrocity and the international failure that accompanied it.
Its legacy. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.
- Author
- Philip Gourevitch
- First published
- 1998
- Genre
- Narrative nonfiction
- Theme
- The Postcolonial State and Its Discontents
It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower
Next →Warlord Politics and African States
More from The Postcolonial State and Its Discontents
- Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism — Mahmood Mamdani
Colonialism split Africans into citizens and subjects, and independence kept the divide.
- On the Postcolony — Achille Mbembe
Power in the postcolony rules through spectacle, excess and grotesque intimacy.
- The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly — Jean-Francois Bayart
Politics as appetite: power pursued through patronage and the belly.
- The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence — Martin Meredith
Fifty years of independence, from the hopes of 1960 to their unraveling.