Representing the Itsembabwoko

this tiethat unites usis the shadow of a shadow—there is no doubt—but it is engorgedwith blood and storms

—Umar Timol

The Kinyarwandan word itsembabwoko did not exist before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The Rwandan government and survivor groups invented it to describe the genocide. Itsemba means 'to decimate,' and bwoko is the term for the Rwandans' social identity before they were divided into ethnic groups; it can designate one's regional belonging, profession, or clan. Surely, the Rwandan genocide should be called by the name that the Rwandans themselves have chosen for it? Today it is true that they still often refer to the "war" rather than the genocide and say "patrols" for the gangs of killers. This militaristic terminology, which suggests an extermination perpetrated by the elite rather than by the people, will only evolve through a long, multidisciplinary, and artistic working on memory that reveals the singularity of the Itsembabwoko. The word shoah ('catastrophe' in Hebrew) was chosen by the Israeli parliament in 1951 to refer to the "Final Solution," but only really caught on in 1985 thanks to Claude Lanzmann's monumental work, which the director defined as a film on the topicality of the genocide.¹ Prior to that, the word holocaust (sacrifice) was most widely used, boosted by the international success of the American television series of the same name, followed by an estimated 220 million viewers in 1978. The term remains widespread in the Anglo-American world. As Jean-Michel Frodon writes, then, "a film and a television series were behind the two now commonly accepted terms used to describe this major event."² In this article, we shall discuss ten feature films and several of the many documentaries shot to date: the cinema has repeatedly addressed the Itsembabwoko. Up until now, this has mainly been at the initiative of foreigners, and above all Westerners. None as yet appear to have imposed a name that is capable of capturing the singularity of the event.

Aside from those of corpses, there aren't any images of the Itsembabwoko killings. Nor, therefore, are there images of the killers in action, with the exception of the one shot of someone being murdered with a machete at a roadblock, filmed from eight hundred meters away with a zoom lens by the British reporter Nick Hughes and broadcast the world over.

Yet, from April 6 to July 4, 1994, at the very moment that Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa on April 27, huge numbers of predominantly rural-dwelling Rwandans were exterminated en masse by their neighbors because they were Tutsi or Tutsi sympathizers. The United Nations (UN) estimates the number of those killed at 800,000, a massacre perpetrated far from the cameras. Lists of victims had been prepared, and the Itsembabwoko was planned in advance. Thousands of radios had even been distributed to facilitate indoctrination. Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) openly advocated the elimination of the inyenzi (roaches). Describing the Itsembabwoko as a tribal or ethnic war is a terrible error: it amounts to repeating the same racist logic of its perpetrators. The notion of the ethnic group is a remnant of colonial ideology. It is an invention designed to categorize populations and cultures that define themselves differently and notably in terms of their lineage, history, founding myths, religion, economic specialties, and so on. This classification set in stone something that was not static and turned it into something essentialist: they are such and such. In the 1930s in Rwanda, the colonial administration introduced a pass bearing the inscription hutu, tutsi, or twa to better regulate tax collection. The Rwandans started defining themselves in these terms as a result of this contact with the Europeans. Yet they all share the same language, culture, religion, and territory and claim to descend from the same mythical ancestor. The categories Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa are only one element of a far more complex social identity summed up in the term bwoko, and it used to be possible to move from one category to another through marriage or...