Philip Gourevitch presents his reader with a two-part inquiry into the 1994 Rwandan crimes against humanity – an account that underlines how 'the West's post-holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow'. In the first part of his work, he examines the events leading up to the horrors, features eyewitness accounts of the experiences during the genocide and concludes with a summary of its immediate aftermath. In the second part he sets out to discover how Rwandans live with absence, live with the fact that a million of their country-folk have been murdered. 

As I read this work, I found myself engaging with the text in a number of different ways; sometimes it read like parts of a doctoral dissertation edging towards a theory of genocide; sometimes it had the feel of case study research; sometimes it shaded into the case histories of individual and social trauma; and sometimes it was more akin to investigative journalism – a sustained attempt to discover the truth and to search for justice. The intermingling of critical questioning, theory building, and, interview data made for a rather disjointed narrative. I would have preferred a simpler organisation and to have a clearer logical structure underpinning the text. I was not always sure how a particular section or extended passage related to that which had preceded it. 

Overall though, Gourevitch succeeds in showing how pitifully inadequate the conventional understanding of Rwanda’s deep and terrible tragedy has been. He underlines how unforgivably slow any proper international response to the genocide was. Rather unexpectedly, he provides a terrific portrayal of moral and political leadership as he focuses on the strategic thinking of the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s General Paul Kagame: it warrants a place on any serious leadership development programme. He also begins to show how a ‘post-post colonial’ response is beginning to take shape in Africa and how certain of its leaders have developed a sophisticated rationale for their 'no party democracies'. But perhaps most importantly he leaves us in no doubt how complete the destruction in Rwanda had been as 'a shadow world of the severely traumatised and achingly bereft established itself in the ruins'. 

Gourevitch’s book raises some difficult questions about how one is supposed to respond to this study of extreme human cruelty and suffering. A review – if it follows the conventions of reviews – seems, necessarily, to leave out all those chilling and dreadful emotions that accounts of genocide provoke. This important work takes you to a grim and awful stillness, to a place where words run out.