Denial Through Silence… (Africa Faced with the Genocide of the Tutsi)

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the discourses of denial about the genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda. First, it focuses on what we can call a “French denial,” represented by the writings of the journalists Pierre Péan and Stephen Smith and of the social scientists Claudine Vidal, André Guichaoua, and Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian scholar, and by the inquiry of the anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière. Secondly, this article mentions the African intellectuals who have accepted those lines openly or tacitly. If they had studied precisely the events that occurred in Rwanda, they could have countered western denial about the genocide against the Tutsi. Taking the example of an association in Senegal, the author shows that the time for acceptance based on precise study has not yet come.

KEYWORDS:

• Rwanda
• Tutsi genocide denial
• Jean-Louis Bruguière
• Paul Kagamé
• Afro-pessimism
• racism
• Karachi bombings

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Boubacar Boris Diop

Boubacar Boris Diop is a Senegalese novelist, journalist, and essayist and has established himself today as one of the most prominent contemporary Francophone writers. The Knight and His Shadow, published last January by Michigan University Press, is his second book translated in English, after Murambi, the Book of Bones (Indiana UP, 2006), which stems from his stay in Kigali, Rwanda, in 1998, four years after the genocide. He is the author of several essays, but also of many other novels, plays, and screenplays. He was awarded the Senegalese Republic Grand Prize in 1990 for Les Tambours de la mémoire, as well as the Prix Tropiques for The Knight and His Shadow. Boubacar Boris Diop also wrote one of the only novels ever written in Wolof, a Sub-Saharan African language. Doomi Golo was published in Dakar in 2003 (Papyrus Africa).