You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know

Philip Gourevitch returns, twenty years after the genoicide, to Rwanda and the eastern Congo April 2014 marks the twentieth anniversary of perhaps the most terrible single event in many of our lifetimes: the Rwandan genocide, in which at least 800,000 Tutsis were massacred and an entire region of Central Africa was convulsed and permanently changed by wave upon wave of refugees and fighting. This cataclysm provoked an extraordinary book: Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families – a book which more than any other stands as a memorial to what happened, bringing together both a mass of personal testimony and remarkable descriptive and analytic skills. Now, Gourevitch has returned to eastern Central Africa to talk to survivors, including those he interviewed in his earlier book, and report vividly on this tumultuous, harsh and still traumatized region, in which everyone lives with ‘It’ – the genocide – everyone knows the perpetrators, everyone knows who failed or passed any number of moral tests in the following years. You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know is the result – a truly exceptional meditation on how individuals can continue with their lives under impossible conditions, and on the nature of evil.