LEFT TO TELL, by Immaculée Ilibagiza with Steve Erwin

Immaculée Ilibagiza. Left To Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust. California: Hay House. 2006. Also available as an Audio Book.

This is a story of the Rwandan genocide, told in simple, direct language. It is the story of the triumph of faith over unimaginable adversity.

Until quite recently, I worked for the tribunal the UN set up to try the perpetrators and organisers of the genocide. Even the peripheral contact I had with the events, ten years after they occurred, was highly traumatic. In the end, I needed counselling. One of the reviewers of the book says he cannot imagine how people who have undergone such adversity manage to live normal lives afterwards. I cannot imagine it myself.

Immaculate Ilibagiza is a brave woman. Her bravery is based in her very strong belief in her God. She and six other women stayed in a tiny bathroom for three months, fed on scraps by the pastor who was hiding them. During that time, she placed her trust entirely in God.  Her faith survived the loss of all but one member of her immediate family. It survived the betrayal of her friends, teachers and boyfriend. Such faith is rare, and I can only respect a person who has it.

However, though there is strong element of faith in the book, it is not a holy-roller treatise. It is a chronicle of the hundred days of madness that took hold of Rwanda from April to June 1994.

Crimes of a sexual nature committed during the genocide were particularly horrible. Sons were forced to rape their mothers, fathers forced to sleep with their daughters, and pregnant women eviscerated. Women were raped by groups of men, and objects like sticks and machetes pushed up their private parts. I can only cringe in horror when I think of what could have happened to Ilibagiza in that regard. Luckily, it did not. But terrible things happened to her family members.

Ilibagiza’s brother, who had a Master’s degree, had his head split open so that his assailants could see what a Master’s degree brain looked like. This reminded me of my university days. We had a strike, and the near-illiterate soldiers and policemen, painfully conscious of their lack of education, made students sit in the mud and chant: “Le CEPE dépasse le Bac”, which meant: the First School Leaving Certificate is more than the “A” Levels. The torture was not on the scale of the genocide, of course, but ignorant peasants with a chip on their shoulder are the same everywhere. They are the tools with which leaders and intellectuals implement their political schemes.

Several books have been written about Rwanda. In my view, they will never be enough. Sixty years after the Jewish holocaust, books are still being published about it. We are not allowed to forget what happened to the Jews. That is good, because a terrible thing happened to them, and those who were responsible must remember it with shame and remorse so that they are deterred from repeating it.  But there is a general tendency to forget the Rwandan genocide. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that it is because it happened to black people in a poor country with no oil. But we must not forget, because all humans bear in them the seeds of genocide. I was particularly worried when rumours began to circulate that some of the Rwandan higher-ups who had taken refuge in Cameroon were busy organising the training of a sort of Interahamwe (the Rwandan militia of disaffected youths and thugs who were used as the instrument of the genocide) to prepare for a showdown with those who sought to wrest power from the current regime. I hope to God it was not true.

Before the Rwandan genocide, many Africans thought that it was the moral bankruptcy of the white man that causes him to kill on a large scale. Then the Rwandan genocide happened. Circumstances can exacerbate old tensions to boiling point, and normally friendly neighbours can turn into bloodthirsty fiends. We must not forget. The madness of bloodlust and hatred lurks in all races. We are all potential genocidaires, because we are all human, black, brown, yellow or white. Ilibagiza’s book illustrates this with chilling accuracy.

I have just one quarrel with the book, but it is not about its contents. It is about the blurbs on the first two pages. One feels, looking at the supposedly impressive lists of their achievements, that the people quoted there are more concerned with selling themselves than plugging the book. I do not doubt that they were very helpful to Ilibagiza, but I wish they had not indulged their vanity so blatantly.

Other than that, this is a book we should all read.

The Diary of Immaculée, a chronicle of Imaculée's return to Rwanda, is now available on DVD.

Comments

[Al]

Immaculee Ilibagiza is an inspiration and an awesome woman, more than a survivor.

Book: The Titus Concept Money For My Best and Highest Good
Website: www.theonlyoption.net

Free Teleseminar Monday Oct 9th at 9:00pm EDT.
www.theonlyoption.net/seminar.php or see website.

[Julaine]

This book is an amazing story of strength within faith and it has definitly been one of the more real and unreal genocidic reads I've done lately. I've been doing research on the armenian genocide, the holocaust as well as the Rawanda Genocides and I came accross a Pilgrimage that Ilibagiza is hosting to all the catholic monuments in europe. Here is the link to the press release:

[liz juma]

My God can immacule tell me how she managed to forgive the people who did that to her it has moved all my emotions