Preemptive Testimony: Literature as Witness to Genocide in Rwanda

This article examines the work of literature as testimony to tragedy in the context of the Rwandan genocide and the 1998 “Writing in Duty to Memory” project, in which ten African authors visited Rwanda with the idea of bearing witness to what happened in 1994. The article surveys varying outlooks on the value of literary testimony, particularly Patrice Nganang’s idea of preemptive writing. Nganang admonishes African authors to preempt future tragedy rather than offer testimonies to past trauma. By reading the works of two “Writing in Duty to Memory” project authors, Boris Diop’s Murambi, the Book of Bones and Véronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda, I argue that literature can not only restore the inhumanity of events like genocide, but also preempt future tragedy by exposing the conditions that make violence possible and imagining a way to move forward constructively.