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A hundred days of carnage, twenty-five years of rebirth.
Silver Medal, 2020 Benjamin Franklin Awards, IBPA
In the space of a hundred days, a million Tutsi in Rwanda were slaughtered by their Hutu neighbors. At the height of the genocide, as men with bloody machetes ransacked her home, Denise Uwimana gave birth to her third son. With the unlikely help of Hutu Good Samaritans, she and her children survived. Her husband and other family members were not as lucky.
If this were only a memoir of those chilling days and the long, hard road to personal healing and freedom from her past, it would be remarkable enough. But Uwimana didn’t stop there. Leaving a secure job in business, she devoted the rest of her life to restoring her country by empowering other genocide widows to band together, tell their stories, find healing, and rebuild their lives. The stories she has uncovered through her work and recounted here illustrate the complex and unfinished work of truth-telling, recovery, and reconciliation that may be Rwanda’s lasting legacy. Rising above their nation’s past, Rwanda’s genocide survivors are teaching the world the secret to healing the wound of war and ethnic conflict.
Includes 16 pages of color photographs.
I cannot put this book down. Denise Uwimana manages to hold on to her faith in God despite all the evil she witnessed, and puts names to the numbers of the horrific 1994 Rwandan genocide. She does not sugarcoat the carnage, nor does she let anyone off the hook – this genocide was fueled by decades of colonialism, arms sales and the intervention of outside countries, but she ultimately identifies the reality that Rwanda was overcome by pure evil. Through all this she shares the kindness of Hutu friends, neighbors and even strangers, as well as miracles and answered prayers. But the most powerful part of the book is when she gets involved in groups that help Rwanda heal from this terrible wound – and even forgive. The stories are nothing short of miraculous.
The author lived through one of the world’s most tragic and disgraceful periods of history. Along with her three children she hid out hoping to escape the brutality that went on all around her. With her strong faith in God and help from Hutu friends, she survived and went on to help others who lost family members and were traumatized as a result of witnessing the most horrendous crimes committed against the Tutsi people of Rwanda.
In her opening sentence Uwimana anchors the reader by using the events of 9/11 and the almost 3000 people killed that day to provide a point of reference to imagine the genocide against the Tutsi and the deaths of more than 1 million people in Rwanda in the 1990s. As startling as this comparison is, it does not prepare us for the heart-wrenching, personal accounting of the devastation she, her family, community, and country endured during the 100-day slaughter. It is also a memoir of the power of women coming to together under the most unimaginable of circumstances to restore and rebuild, to go forward.
This is such a well-written account of the genocide in Rwanda. I’ve always felt an obligation to learn about the Holocaust, but hadn’t heard much about the genocide in Rwanda, which is much more recent history. Although this book is a challenge to read due to some of the gruesome details, it is important to read. We must understand how conflicts like this arise and learn from them to prevent it from happening again in the future. Thank you, Denise, for sharing your story and for the work you do to help your country heal from this tragedy.
