Anthropology Researcher's Book Examines Hidden Heroes of Rwanda Genocide

ATLANTA — During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, conflict between two ethnic groups, Hutus and Tutsis, resulted in widespread violence and mass killings. In the span of 100 days, an estimated 800,000 people, mostly Tutsi, were systematically murdered.

Jennie Burnet, associate professor of anthropology at Georgia State University, has studied the Rwandan genocide for 25 years. For her new book, “To Save Heaven and Earth: Rescue in the Rwandan Genocide,” Burnet and her team of Rwandan research assistants and translators devoted two years to intensive fieldwork in Rwanda. The team conducted more than 200 interviews across the country, some in places where no one had ever interviewed people about the genocide.

Burnet’s book shares stories of the courageous people who risked their lives to save others. Burnet, who is also director of the Institute for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, explores the decisions these individuals made in their attempts to commit acts of heroism amid pervasive evil.

Q. In the book, you highlight that people’s roles in genocide are complex and can’t be categorized as strictly good or strictly bad. Why was that such an important point to make?

A. There’s a classic typology deployed in comparative genocide studies of victim, perpetrator, bystander and rescuer. I knew that that typology was useful but was not an explanatory model because people did shift or move from one category to another.

Nonetheless, when I began this project on rescue in Rwanda, I was like, “Oh, people rescued because they’re good.” And what I found was the answer is much more complex because many, many, many of the perpetrators in Rwanda who killed people also helped people. And their reasons for killing some and helping others were not always simple. It wasn’t just that they helped people that they knew and killed people they didn’t know. It was often much more complicated than that.

Q. What was most surprising about this work?

A. One of the most surprising conclusions for me of the book — of the project as a whole — is that being a perpetrator of genocide actually gave you power to save people because appearing to the state, and those people in charge, that you are participating in the genocide actively made you not be under suspicion of helping people or saving people.

Kabera, who I interviewed, appears early in the book because it was a very compelling interview. He was one of the perpetrators I’ve interviewed who was very forthcoming about all the terrible, terrible things he did and spoke openly about them, not in gruesome detail, but said, “Yes, I killed dozens of people. That’s very true.” And yet I was surprised to discover that he also saved people.

The other really surprising finding for me is that I had assumed that rescuers rescued because they were good people and did good things. What I came to understand is that many of the people who were rescuers — and who only rescued and did not participate in the genocide — often had to make morally dubious decisions in order to succeed in rescuing people. There’s the example of the orphanage where some Italian priests rescued over 800 children, but they would not allow adult Tutsis from the community to come in and hide in the orphanage because it put the children in danger.

I also show that many of those people who saved because they were wanting to do good things, some of them lost their lives because they refused to compromise their morality. So, in a sense, successful rescue often depended, in part, on making morally problematic decisions.

Q. Why is it important to look at the good even in such dark times?

A. A motivating factor for me in writing this book — or even undertaking the research at all — is that I think those people who risked their lives or risked their families’ lives to try to help people during the genocide need their stories to be known.

Having studied genocide and its aftermath for 25 years now, it is important to remember that there are glimmers of hope and that there are these small acts of kindness that occurred in the midst of really terrible things. It was small acts of kindness, but also great acts of bravery or even small acts of courage. These things were there, and I think it’s important for us to identify them, recognize them and remember them so that we don’t lose hope.

Q. Can you speak to the value of this type of work on people who may not see themselves as connected to the genocide in any way?

A. I think portrayals of Rwanda, and the Rwandan genocide in the United States, unfortunately, have tended to reinforce very negative stereotypes that many Americans have of Africa and of Africans. And it wasn’t helped that in 1994, the media coverage in the United States of the genocide and its aftermath played into stereotypes of Africans being particularly prone to war or violence, or other kinds of things.

In both of my books and all my writings on Rwanda, one of my purposes that’s very important to me is to show that Rwandans are not any different as people than we are here in the United States. They may live in a different context, and they might have different problems, but they also have a lot of the same problems and a lot of the same difficulties.

I think, unfortunately, it’s easier for some Americans to see the similarities between themselves and, for instance, people now in Ukraine, or back in the ’90s, between themselves and people in Yugoslavia, because they imagine that Europeans’ lives are more similar to their own than Africans’.

And part of that is based on race or racism or racist notions of the world. But part of that is also just based on economies and being modern, industrial nations and those kinds of things. So, it’s not just racism. It’s more complicated than that. And yet the racism is still in there, unfortunately.

One of the things I’ve learned from being friends with and working with Rwandans and doing research on Rwanda for so long is that the differences between Hutu, Tutsi and Twa in Rwanda — the three ethnic groups or races — are almost entirely analogous to how race functions in the United States. It’s just that the physical markers on the body are much more subtle in Rwanda because it’s not about skin color, it’s about a lot of other, much more subtle physical markers.

And that could make us despair like, “Oh, humans are never going to get past these things,” or we could take from that lesson instead that if the shape of your nose is enough to distinguish what so-called category you belong to and your value as a person — and we think that’s absurd and ridiculous — then skin tone, and the kinds of things that we look at in the United States as markers of differences are just as inconsequential or absurd. Not that that’s going to immediately solve all our problems, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Q. What has been the most rewarding part of the research for this book?

A. One of the interpreters who worked with us and had worked with me also on my dissertation and first book research back in the late ’90s and early 2000s was a genocide survivor. We interviewed a man who was Seventh-day Adventist and he had saved a lot of people in the genocide. After the interview, she thanked the man for giving us the interview and said, “I never knew that people did such courageous things to help people because no one helped me in 1994.”

She later elaborated on that to me about how just knowing that there were people like that out there helped her feel more hopeful about the future of the country and feel like at least some people were helped by others. So that’s one of the things I think I’m proud of, or that I think is an important contribution that the book makes.

And any time I have Rwandans who read my work and who say, “You’ve gotten it right,” is also very rewarding. As well as then to hear from non-Rwandans, from Americans who’ve read it, and they’re like, “You opened my eyes to something new and I understand it better.” 

Q. Was there anything else you wanted to share?

A. The last thing I would say, and it’s something that comes out of both my first book and this book, is that I’ve always been amazed at how resilient humans in general are, but in particular, the Rwandans I’ve known for so long. No matter what terrible things happen in your life, it is possible to find a way to move forward and build a meaningful life and go on and find joy and those other kinds of things. Here, I went looking for hope in a very, very difficult circumstance.

I think it’s something I keep coming back to as someone who studies these very difficult histories and very difficult topics to remind myself that when it feels like there is no hope, there is hope somewhere in there. 

— Interview by Stella Mayerhoff. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.