Books about Rwanda.

• Author: Gribbin, Robert
• Position: Rwandan Genocide - Recommended readings

Prior to the genocide, little was written about Rwanda. Rene Lemarchand's Rwanda and Burundi was an academic tome that covered the history and culture of the region. Dian Fossey wrote Gorillas in the Mist about the gentle creatures she encountered. However, the genocide sparked many books - histories, analyses, memoirs, explanations, polemics and fiction.

The following annotated list was compiled by Robert E. Gribbin, himself the author of In the Aftermath of Genocide: The U.S. Role in Rwanda

-Gerard Prunier's The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide is an excellent overview of the situation and events leading up to the violence.

-Ambassador David Rawson's Prelude to Genocide goes into detail about the Arusha negotiations designed to bring peace between contending parties. The final accords were fatally flawed and led directly to the genocide.

-Kigali DCM Joyce Leader's Remembering Rwanda ably recounts what was going on in Kigali--political maneuvering, assassinations, intimidations--in the months before and during the first few days of genocide.

-We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families by Philip Gourevitch provides gripping intimate details of how the genocide affected a set of representative individuals.

-Another gripping compendium of personal stories is the Human Rights Watch publication Leave None to Tell the Story.

-General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN peacekeeping operation UNAMIR, laid bare his soul and regrets in Shaking Hands with the Devil.

-Colonel Tom Odum, who arrived just after the genocide as the U.S. Defence Attache, wrote about the internal and regional turbulence in Journey into Darkness.

-Shaharyar Khan, who became the Secretary General's Representative in 1995, expanded on peacekeeping problems and troubled relations with the new Tutsi-led government in The Shallow Graves of Rwanda.

-On a lighter note, Rosamond Carr's memoir Land of a Thousand Hills recalls her long happy life in Rwanda, but culminates in her decision at age 85 to open an orphanage for victims of genocide.

-Gerard Prunier returns again to the list with his book Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Makings of a Continental Catastrophe. Prunier grinds an anti-Rwanda (and anti-U.S.) axe in this exposition of how the genocide spilled over into the Congo.

-Colin M. Waugh weighed in with Paul Kagame and Rwanda, an authorized biography of Rwanda's leader.

-Stephen Kinzer's biography A Thousand Hills...