Jan Vansina
African Studies Review 43/3
December 2000
MARIE BÉATRICE UMUTESI, Fuir ou Mourir au Zaïre, L'Harmattan, Paris 2000
"Fuir ou Mourir au Zaire" is totally different [from the other books reviewed] and by far the most important of the works reviewed here, if only because it bears witness to events of overarching significance for Africa and for the world: the horror of the genocide in Rwanda (over a half million victims) in 1994, followed by the no lesser horror of the Rwandan refugees in 1996-97. This Hutu Rwandan, a university-trained social worker and a member of various NGOs, saw her family flee from Byumba to escape being killed by the RPF. They took refuge with her in Kigali in 1993. Then, during the genocide in 1994, she fled from Kigali westward, ending up in the Bukavu area camps. Two years later she fled once more from Bukavu to Mbandaka on a long march that covered two thousand kilometres of rain forest. She tells in unadorned, honest, and straightforward language what happened to her and to her companions: what they saw, what they felt, what rumours they heard during their flights or in the camps, their fears, their hopes, their disappointments, their illnesses, deaths, and the horror of it all. This account testifies above all to what humanity itself consists of in its greatness, depravity, and resilience. There are no enemy groups in this book; members of all of them were equally stricken. On occasion some individual villains are mentioned, but Umutesi prefers to dwell on individual heroes of charity such as Ma Mundimi, the 'mad woman' of Batsina.
The account in the first part of the book illuminates many points which the literature about this genocide has ignored or oversimplified, just as the description following this illustrates the misery, the tensions, the ambiguities of foreign aid organisations, and the social complexity of life in the Kivu camps - again far beyond the academic reports available about them. But the most important part of this work is its narrative of the flight from Bukavu to Mbandaka because the horrors of this march have been denied or minimized to the point of triviality by all the armies and agencies involved (including the U.S. government at the time). To this day a curtain of official silence has been drawn over the deaths of an estimated 300,000 refugees during the Congo campaign of 1996-97. As this account makes clear, they died in massacres or as a the result of manhunts organised mainly by Rwanda FPR troops but aggravated by military men of all armies on the ground. This is a story about a succession of death camps that remained until the survivors were so few and the wilderness so great that only small groups survived. It is a story that has been suppressed by all parties involved: governments, armies, international organisations, and media. So far Umutesi's book remains the only monument to all those who fell, and some of her pages achieve a greatness surpassing that of any ordinary memoir or testimony.
It is, indeed, impossible to do justice to such a towering work within the compass of a review article about immediate history, a genre to which it does not belong at all. For Umutesi's book is also a literary monument. Her story is an epic for out times, a tale to ponder for the lessons it conveys, testimony so powerful and moving that it reaches an unintended literary greatness. The flight through the rain forest reminded this reader, in turn, of Xenophon's Katabasis, of some of Tolstoy's stirring passages about the retreat from Moscow in War and Peace, and of Lianja's epic travels through these same forests. Even without the exceptional importance of what it has to tell, its literary qualities are such that the book could and should become a classic. Nevertheless, for readers of this journal in particular it should be required reading because of its historical importance and its implications for all Central Africans, all refugees, and all who study Africa. One hopes that one day this book, or selections from it, will become part of the high school and college curriculums in East and Central Africa.