Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey

A journalist who covered the one-hundred-day Rwandan war in 1994 provides a disturbing account that suggests that a power-hungry group, using hate radio and local political leaders as brainwashers, purposefully incited thousands of Hutus to kill minority Tutsis and more moderate Hutus.

Fergal Keane, an Irish journalist, formerly BBC correspondent in South Africa, was sent in 1994 to cover the war in Rwanda that had left one million Tutsis dead, most of them gruesomely hacked to death by their Hutu neighbors. The power of this account lies in Keane's profound emotional shock at barely imaginable cruelty, and in the personal testimony of the survivors he interviewed. Keane also searches for meaning. Like many familiar with Africa, he rejects the too easy explanation of "tribal hatred," with its assumption that the problem is intractable and internal. He emphasizes instead the economic and class disparities driving a political bloodlust, reminiscent perhaps of revolutionary France. Even though understanding such atrocity seems out of reach, Keane bears eloquent witness to evil.