Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust

The conflict between Hutus and Tutsis is not a “natural” feature of being Rwandan. It is a socially constructed hatred that has been passed down throughout the generations.

Immaculée’s parents do not want to propagate hatred, so Immaculée and her brothers grow up without understanding that they are Tutsi: “I had no way of knowing then, but Damascene was as clueless as I was about tribalism in Rwanda…which was odd, considering that we were among the best-educated kids in the area” (14). As children, Immaculée and her brothers are protected from the violence that will eventually irreparable shape her life: “But there were history lessons our parents didn’t want my brothers and me to learn, at least not while we were young. They never talked to us about discrimination or killing sprees or ethnic cleansing” (15). What’s more, Immaculée’s mother and father made sure to surround their children with people from all walks of life: “Everyone was welcome in our home, regardless of race, religion, or tribe. To my parents, being Hutu or Tutsi had nothing to do with the kind of person you were” (15). Though Immaculée’s parents do their best to spare their children from the tribalistic prejudice, nothing they could have done (short of leaving Rwanda) could have prevented them from getting involved in the genocide. Immaculée and her family are still branded as Tutsis, even if they do not believe in those distinctions.

The conflict between Hutus and Tutsis has its origins in the early 1900s, when Belgium was the colonial occupier of Rwanda. The Belgians backed the Tutsis and uplifted them as a tribe, promoting them to positions of power within the government and providing them with money and status. The Hutus were resentful. When the Belgians left Rwanda, and therefore stopped supporting the Tutsis, the Hutus took action: In 1959 and then later in 1973, Hutus rioted against the Tutsis. Though their commonalities as Rwandans were many, their differences were exaggerated in prejudiced thought: “The differences between Tutsis and Hutus were more difficult to spot: Tutsis were supposed to be taller, lighter-skinned, and have narrower noses; while Hutus were shorter, darker, and broad-nosed” (17). Violent struggles in 1959 and in 1973 do not prevent the genocide—which is, by all measures, even more brutal—from occurring in 1994.

Another theme Left to Tell touches upon, related to prejudice as social construction, is the cyclical nature of historical violence. Even Immaculée, a woman of God and a pacifist, is tempted to retaliate against her Hutu oppressors: “I’d never done anything violent to anyone before, but at that moment I wished I had a gun so that I could kill every Hutu I saw” (88). This is a small-scale version of what has happened worldwide throughout history. In Chapter 10, Immaculée compares the 1994 Rwandan genocide to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, noting that after that atrocity, so many countries vowed that this kind of thing would never happen again.

Immaculée understands exactly how these cycles of violence are perpetuated when she observes orphans in the French refugee camps and thinks of how easy it would be for them to grow up with deep prejudice against the Hutus who destroyed their lives. Immaculée feels it is her mission to disrupt the cycle of violence by working with these orphans directly:

I saw the circle of hatred and mistrust forming in those innocent eyes, and I knew that God was showing me another reason He’d spared me. I vowed that one day, when I was strong and capable enough, I would do everything I could to help the children orphaned by the genocide. I would try to bring hope and happiness to their lives, and steer them away from embracing the hatred that had robbed them of their parents, and of a family’s love (165).

To end the cycle of violence, Immaculée tells their story, and one part of this process is to learn English, so the story can reach more people:

As the days passed, I memorized many of the terms I’d need to tell my story in English. Escape, hiding, war, prayer, job, and God became the cornerstones of my growing English vocabulary—and each new word was as precious as a jewel. I also committed the words before and after memory because by then I knew that I’d always refer to my life in terms of before or after the holocaust (117).

Another major theme in Left to Tell is how quickly neighbors turn to strangers and friends become enemies, during civil war. In the case of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, the country’s government encouragement to kill Tutsis facilitates the Hutus, who have lived in relative peace with their Tutsi neighbors, to suddenly treat the Tutsis with hostility, hatred, and violence.

Early in the conflict, it becomes apparent that neighbors can suddenly turn on one another when an old childhood friend of Immaculée’s father—a Hutu by the name of Kabayi—has him arrested. This is just the first of many Hutu neighbors and friends who will betray Immaculée and her family. In another related incident, Immaculée gets a mixed message looking at one of her Hutu neighbors, symbolizing the conflicted (and contradictory) nature of civil war: “I opened my eyes and saw Kageyo, a Hutu, but also a good friend of my father’s. He was carrying a very big spear, but there was kindness in his eyes” (55).

Sometimes Immaculée cannot believe that, just a short time ago, she lived peacefully among her Hutu neighbors. Community in the village is like an extension of family in Rwandan culture, so this mistreatment is particularly jarring: “It wasn’t the soldiers who were chanting, nor was it the trained militiamen who had been tormenting us for days. No, these were my neighbors, people I’d grown up and gone to school with—some had even been to our house for dinner” (77). The closeness Immaculée once shared with her Hutu neighbors does nothing to prevent them from feeling the Tutsis are “cockroaches” worthy of death when the war begins.