We Wish to Inform You (edit title)

Tim W edited the quotations of We Wish to Inform You Wednesday, September 16 2009.

• Added a quotation: “Colonisation is violence, and there are many ways to carry out that violence. In addition to military and administrative chiefs and a veritable army of churchmen, the Belgians dispatched scientists to Rwanda. The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and callipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they had believed all along. Tutsis had a ‘nobler’, more ‘naturally’ aristocratic dimensions than the ‘coarse’ and ‘bestial’ Hutus. On the ‘nasal index’ for instance, the median Tutsi nose was found to be about two and a half millimetres longer and nearly five millimetres narrower than the median Hutu nose.”
• Added a quotation: “In 1933-34, the Belgians conducted a census in order to issue ‘ethnic’ identity cards, which labelled every Rwandan as either Hutu (85%) of Tutsi (14%) or Twa (1%). The identity cards made it virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis, and permitted the Belgians to perfect the administration of an apartheid system rooted in the myth of Tutsi superiority… Whatever Hutu and Tutsi identity may have stood for in the pre-colonial state no longer mattered; the Belgians had made ‘ethnicity’ the defining feature of Rwandan existence.”
• Added a quotation: “Like Leontius, the young Athenian in Plato, I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps, in examining this extremity with me, you hope for some understanding, some insight, some flicker of self-knowledge – a moral, or a lesson, or a clue about how to behave in this world: some such information. I don’t discount the possibility, but when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up with for looking closely into Rwanda’s stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it. The horror, the horror, interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand its legacy.”

Tim W edited the summary of We Wish to Inform You Wednesday, September 16 2009.

• Philip Gourevitch, a staff writer for The New Yorker spends two years travelling in Rwanda in 1995-97 and produces an illuminating, if not always objectively rigorous, account of the Rwandan genocide, its causes and its aftermath.

Tim W edited the ridiculously simplified synopsis of We Wish to Inform You Wednesday, September 16 2009.

• Added: Philip Gourevitch spends 2 years travelling in Rwanda and produces an illuminating account of the Rwandan Genocide

Shelfari edited the description of We Wish to Inform You Saturday, August 1 2009.

• An account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity. It chronicles what has happened in Rwanda since 1994, when the government called on the Hutu majority to murder the Tutsi minority. Some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives the book its title. The author descibes the anguish of genocide's aftermath: mass displacements; revenge and the quest for justice; and impossibly crowded prisons and refugee camps. Through portraits of Rwandans in all walks of life, he focuses on the psychological and political challenges of survival.

Shelfari edited the contributors of We Wish to Inform You Thursday, July 23 2009.

• Added a contributor: Philip Gourevitch: (Primary Author)