October
29, 2004
Surviving
the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire
Marie-Beatrice
Umutesi, sociologist and development practitioner, will discuss
her book, which was recently published by the University of
Wisconsin Press, Saturday, November 6, at 3 pm at the Odyssey
Bookshop. In this firsthand account of inexplicable brutality,
day-to-day suffering,
and survival, Umutesi will
shed light on the massacres that targeted the Hutu refugees
of Rwanda after the victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front
in 1994. Umutesi’s
documentation of these years provides the world a history that
is still widely unknown. This poignant autobiography is both
a testimony to the lives and humanity lost, and a call for
those responsible to be held accountable.
Before
the Rwanda genocide Umutesi worked with rural women’s
associations in Gitarama and Byumba, Rwanda. In 1994 she fled
to eastern Congo in desperation along with hundreds of thousands
of other refugees. Two years later she and other refugees were
forced to flee yet again. She and her companions walked, sometimes
ran, westward for 2,000 kilometers through the rainforests
of Zaire. They died by the tens of thousands in gruesome attacks
by Rwandan forces and other marauding armies, and from hunger,
disease, and exhaustion. They were ignored by the international
community and betrayed by humanitarian associations, especially
the United Nations High Commission on Refugees.
Umtesi’s talk is sponsored by the Mount Holyoke College
Program in African American and African Studies; the Endowed
Lecture Fund and the Leanna Brown Fund (department of government),
Smith College; the Five College Council on African Studies;
the Five College lecture committee; and the departments of
anthropology and English and the Interdisciplinary Seminar
in the Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst.
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