We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

Philip Gourevitch

Picador, 1998 - History - 355 pages

An unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity. This remarkable debut book chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech--largely by machete--it was carried out at shocking speed: some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Philip Gourevitch his title. With keen dramatic intensity, Gourevitch frames the genesis and horror of Rwanda's "genocidal logic" in the anguish of its aftermath: the mass displacements, the temptations of revenge and the quest for justice, the impossibly crowded prisons and refugee camps. Through intimate portraits of Rwandans in all walks of life, he focuses on the psychological and political challenges of survival and on how the new leaders of postcolonial Africa went to war in the Congo when resurgent genocidal forces threatened to overrun central Africa. Can a country composed largely of perpetrators and victims create a cohesive national society? This moving contribution to the literature of witness tells us much about the struggle everywhere to forge sane, habitable political orders, and about the stubbornness of the human spirit in a world of extremity.

What people are saying

Review: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

User Review  - Allison - Goodreads

This book had SO much information - I am embarrassed to say I knew hardly any of it before starting. This, on top of the content, made it a very difficult read.

Review: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

User Review  - Marybeth - Goodreads

Yikes! A beautiful yet very haunting and disturbing account of horrific circumstances that we in the United States have not payed nearly enough attention to!

About the author

Philip Gourevitch is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a contributing editor to the Forward. He has reported from Africa, Asia, and Europe for a number of magazines, including Granta, Harper's, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City.

Bibliographic information

• Title: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda; Bestselling Backlist
• Author: Philip Gourevitch
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Picador, 1998
• ISBN: 0312243359, 9780312243357
• Length: 355 pages
• Subjects: History / Africa / Central; History / Africa / General; Political Science / Genocide & War Crimes; Political Science / World / African; Social Science / Criminology; Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations; Social Science / Violence in Society