Brickyards to Graveyards: From Production to Genocide in Rwanda (review)

In the course of three terrible months in 1994, up to one million people were systematically slaughtered in Rwanda, not during a chaotic tribal civil war—as our newspapers reported at the time—but as a deliberate government policy. Their extermination was the result of a carefully planned strategy.

The primary vehicle for carrying out the killings was "youth militias" mobilized among the unemployed. The involvement of the civil administration in encouraging popular participation was another strategy. Both means had been tried out during the previous three and a half years, and both were documented in a 1993 report prepared by an international federation of human rights groups. A third means was the engagement of certain military units. Well before the genocide got underway, its organizers seem to have understood that outside interference would remain minimal. How right they were. No sealed trains or secluded camps were necessary in Rwanda. The genocide was carried out in broad daylight. A modest show of force by the United Nations Security Council at an early stage might have prevented the terror from spreading. Instead, the only action the Council came up with was creating a committee to "evaluate the evidence." The genocide in Rwanda was the first post-World War II extermination genuinely comparable to the Holocaust. The failure to prevent it is one of the great scandals of the last century.

In spite of numerous international enquiries and a growing body of literature, and in spite of the fact that it is now twelve years since the event, significant gaps in our knowledge remain: not only about the conspirators and their plots, but also about the many other factors that pushed this tiny country to its apocalypse.

Brickyards to Graveyards: From Production to Genocide in Rwanda helps to fill some of these gaps. It is in many ways a people's history, the author having taken the brick and tile industry as a microcosm to study the impact of Rwanda's pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial experiences on working people. The author's interviews with people who either controlled or worked in this important economic sector are fascinating, and one regrets that this section of the book is not longer.

Jefremovas began her research in 1984 with an interest in labor organization in small-scale industry. In Rwanda European brick-making technologies had been adapted to local conditions, and there were brick- and tile-making operations in every marsh in the country. At the time Jefremovas's study began, Rwanda was considered a model of development for all of Africa. Ten years later the country was a post-genocidal nightmare.

On a general level, the author's account of Rwanda's tragic history provides a clear and well-reasoned treatment of the past, citing much of the existing literature. There is no consensus among historians or anthropologists on the origins of Rwanda's deadly fault-line between Hutu and Tutsi. Many anthropologists contest the notion that Hutu and Tutsi are distinct groups, maintaining that the distinction is more one of class or caste. The people known as the Hutu were generally cultivators, peasants who resembled the Bantu population in neighboring countries, commonly short and stocky. Most Tutsi were taller and thinner. Some maintain that the Tutsi pastoralists originated in the Horn of Africa, migrating south and gradually achieving dominance over the Hutu. And yet the two groups lived side by side and frequently intermarried. Tutsi were often as poor as their Hutu neighbours. They shared the same myths and legends and spoke the same language, Kinyarwanda. Long before Rwanda became a state, people were speaking variants of Kinyarwanda widely throughout Africa's Great Lakes region.

No one knows precisely when the Rwandan kingdom was founded—some historians believe in 1312, others in 1532. What is known is that Rwanda was an expansionist state with an army ready for plunder. The kingdom overran its neighbors, some tiny and others...