The Rwandan genocide d’après la bande dessinée

By Jo Ellen Fair

Déogratias is Hutu.  His best school friends, sisters Apollinaire and Bénigne, are Tutsi.  He kills them.  Not because he wants to, but because he must.  And for this crime, he roams the city by day in a stupor, searching for enough banana beer to forget what he has done.  At night, he cannot forget the sights, the sounds, the smells of genocide.  He believes himself to be a dog, for dogs eat the bodies of the dead.  The dead watch him from the stars in the sky.

Belgian Jean-Phillipe Stassen's Déogratias, is an exceptional telling of the horrors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which at least 500,000 Rwandans, primarily Tutsis, but also politically moderate Hutus, were killed in three months.  Stassen's form is the cartoon album, in French the bande dessinée or roman graphique.  A cartoon book examining genocide may seem odd and even disrespectful to an American audience.  But hardback cartoon books, many treating serious subjects, are a popular adult genre in France, Belgium, and West and Central Africa.  Stassen's is a serious treatment of a difficult subject, intertwining words and images to make each more effective than it would be alone.  It is a departure for the genre in its depiction of a signal event in modern African history.

In 80 pages, Stassen touches on many of the historical, political, and economic causes and consequences of Rwanda's instabilities.  Set in the Butare préfecture of southern Rwanda, the book plunges the reader into the life of Déogratias before the genocide and just after.  Before the genocide, the young Déogratias works as a helper in a Catholic mission run by two Belgian priests.  Weaving in and out of the life of the mission are a Tutsi prostitute, her two teenage daughters (Apollinaire and Bénigne), and a Twa gardener.  Déogratias adores the elder daughter, Apollinaire, a métisse, fathered, says everyone in the hills, by the older priest.  Rejected by Apollinaire, Déogratias turns to her half-sister, Bénigne, whom he successfully woos.

Apollinaire, the Tutsi-Belgian métisse, represents the pinnacle of an uncertain, internalized racial and ethnic hierarchy, one that put white colonials at the top, followed by Tutsis, Hutus, and Twas.  Remarkably, Stassen manages in scenes from the mission and its vicinity to capture the easy ethnic mixing, the humor and ambivalence surrounding race and ethnicity, and, yet, the palpable, barely hidden potential for ethnic violence in pre-genocide Butare.

Déogratias is ordinary.  He is capable of small moral failings and of small daily kindnesses.  Stassen depicts Déogratias as ordinary to make the important point that the genocide was in large part conducted by ordinary people.  Certainly, extremists fueled the hatred and ordered the killings.  And certainly, there were those -- Hutu and Tutsi -- who resisted and refused to kill.  But Déogratias is neither.  Under pressure by Hutu Power leaders and lacking moral strength, he kills the girl he adores and her sister, his actual lover.  Yet, he does not flee afterwards with the other Hutu killers to the relative safety of Zaire/Congo.  Ultimately, his remorse pushes him to madness.  In this way, Déogratias stands for all ordinary people, we who do not know how we would behave in the crucible of state-sponsored terror.

Déogratias has won several prizes, among them the Goscinny and France International Prizes, for best story and best cartoon album on current affairs.  The book can usefully be paired (in the classroom, for example) with Jean Hatzfeld's poignant Dan le nu de la vie: Récits des marais rwandais (Paris: Seuil, 2000), which provides testimonies from Rwandans who survived the genocide.

Reference:

Stassen, Jean-Phillipe (2000). Déogratias. Paris: Editions Aire Libre.

Caption 1: Juvénal

Caption: Juvénal, the local Hutu Power agitator, leads his men away from the area secured by the French in Operation Turquoise. He promises them they can return later to finish their killings. To make their enemy seem less human, Hutu propaganda often labeled Tutsis cockroaches.

Translation of cartoon:

… don’t worry, guys. The cockroaches are there. It’s true. They [the French] have stopped our work. But we have already made some progress, we have already eliminated a lot of their brothers … It’s only a strategic retreat: we will come back later to finish them off.

Caption 2: Radio

Caption: Following the announcement of President Juvénal Habyarima’s April 6, 1994, death, Radio T'élévision Libre Mille Collines exhorts Hutus to slaughter Tutsis. RTLMC, owned by members of the president's and his wife's entourage, became the voice of the genocide.

Translation of cartoon:

Bénigne: What's going on?

Déogratias: They killed Habyarimana.

Radio: … We ask all our valiant Hutu brothers to not let this crime go unpunished. Arise, brothers! Arise and go to work! Sharpen your machetes, pick up your clubs! We must eradicate this race of cockroaches. Look for them in their holes …

Caption 3: School

Caption: Déogratias sits with his two girlfriends, Apollinaire and Bénigne, at school just before the start of the genocide. The teacher is giving a lecture on the "racial" differences among Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa.

Translation of cartoon:

“Who here is Hutu?”

Jo Ellen Fair is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the past director of the African Studies Program and the director designee of the Global Studies Program. Her research has explored the reporting of conflict and crisis in various countries in Africa such as South Africa, Rwanda, and Somalia. Her current work explores how various media outlets in Africa report on past human rights abuses and national reconciliation processes.