My maternal great-grandparents were Irish immigrants. My paternal grandfather left Liverpool in the late 19th century to go to Australia. I’d love to know their children’s stories! Some of the families I visited as a social worker (mid-1960s) were immigrants, struggling to make sense of a new language and a new culture. I met a child who had come here alone as an illegal immigrant and had been a house slave until the social services settled her with a foster family. I met author Hanna Jansen and her many adopted children from war-torn countries. Fiction gives us many powerful stories about children forced to flee from their homes because of war, tyranny, hunger, poverty, natural disasters.
This is a beautifully written account of how 8-year-old Jeanne d'Arc Umubyeyi (Dédé) escaped the 1994 massacre of the Tutsi ethnic group at the hands of the Huti tribe. Jeanne was the only member of her family to survive. The horror of what she went through is vividly recounted in Jeanne’s words and those of her adoptive mother Hanna Jansen, who adopted her and brought her to Germany.
It is a very powerful, true, story. I had heard of the Rwandan massacre, but knew little about it till I read this novel.
I love the book and have re-read it several times. Young adults will identify strongly with both Jeanne and Hanna.
Before that fateful April day, Jeanne lived the life of a typical Rwandan girl. She bickered with her little sister, went to school, teased her brother. Then, in one horrifying night, everything changed. Political troubles unleashed a torrent of violence upon the Tutsi ethnic group. Jeanne's family, all Tutsis, fled their home and tried desperately to reach safety.
They did not succeed. As the only survivor of her family's massacre, Jeanne witnessed unspeakable acts. This haunting story was told to Jeanne's adoptive mother, and here she makes unforgettably real the events of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
I’ve spent most of my life since the 1970s working with whales and dolphins. I was lucky to get involved in one of the first field studies for killer whales and since then have led other research in the Russian Far East. I have worked with entomologists in Costa Rican rainforests, blue whale scientists in Québec and Iceland, humpback whale scientists in Hawaii. I’ve searched for rare North Atlantic right whales in the Bay of Fundy, measured Canada’s tallest trees in British Columbia and seen the wild plant ancestors of maize growing in the mountains of Mexico. Field research—studying and living in nature—makes us empathize with Planet Earth.
George Schaller’s pioneering popular Year of the Gorilla, set in Rwanda, is part history, travelogue, and accessible behavioral biology. This book was my model for how to write about my own seven summers living with killer whales off northern Vancouver Island, Canada. Travelling with wife Kay, Schaller in his mid-20s was among the first to get into the field with primates when few even considered it. Rich with stories, his book included his own beautiful line drawings of gorillas and tantalising maps. The story uncovers a misty kingdom—he climbed the volcanoes—as much as revealing the intimate details of the gorillas, with their food gathering, nest-building, relationships, their emotional lives. This book has human and gorilla characters. You feel like you are right there.
This seminal work chronicles George B. Schaller's two years of travel and observation of gorillas in East and Central Africa in the late 1950s, high in the Virunga volcanoes on the Zaire-Rwanda-Uganda border. There, he learned that these majestic animals, far from being the aggressive apes of film and fiction, form close-knit societies of caring mothers and protective fathers watching over playful young. Alongside his observations of gorilla society, Schaller celebrates the enforced yet splendid solitude of the naturalist, recounts the adventures he experienced along the way, and offers a warning against poaching and other human threats against these endangered…
I love the fantastic—madly, insatiably. Far too much, indeed, to limit myself to what the publishers label “fantasy”. Such labels don’t enlighten us, however much they condition us to predictable purchasing behavior. We’re better off ignoring them. We’re better off defining fantasy for ourselves. These five knockout novels are saturated with fantasy. It’s high time we fantasy lovers recognized our kin.
Do you like a good scare? Well, Stephen King is one kind of scary, but A Question of Power is something else altogether: a descent into a sunless valley writhing with monsters. We know that these monsters dwell in the mind of the main character, Elizabeth. But there’s no safety in knowing that, for we’re locked in with them. If we sometimes climb a tree and feel a fresh breeze on our faces, it’s with the knowledge that those tentacles can slither up and snatch us back into hell at a moment’s notice. And they do.
I didn’t start with what many consider the most important facts of this novel: that Elizabeth is a mixed-race woman born in South Africa and exiled to Botswana. And those are vital facts. But Elizabeth is also one luminous, suffering soul. Watching her fight her way out of that dark valley is a terrifying…
"It wasn't any kind of physical stamina that kept her going, but a vague, instinctive pattern of normal human decencies combined with the work she did, the people she met each day and the unfolding of a project with exciting inventive possibilities. But a person eventually becomes a replica of the inner demons he battles with. Any kind of demon is more powerful than normal human decencies, because such things do not exist for him." Bessie Head
In this fast-paced, semi-autobiographical novel, Head exposes the complicated life of Elizabeth, whose reality is intermingled with nightmarish dreams and hallucinations. Like the…
I feel compelled to write political works when I see an injustice, violation, corruption, or travesty that needs to be addressed. It's possibly the result of my heritage as a citizen of a British-colonized country and the child of parents from a Christian-colonized slice of a continent. As a journalist, I experienced censure and censorship by editors who wished to maintain their held beliefs about certain people, races, issues, and subjects. As a novelist, I was rejected by mainstream publishers for writing deemed too political. However, I made a commitment as a writer not to change my words to appease publishers or editors because it made them uncomfortable.
This is a harrowing account of the genocide in Rwanda told by one of its survivors, Imaculee llibagiza, after Hutu soldiers murdered her father, mother, and two brothers during a killing spree that took the lives of a million Rwandans.
In a fight for survival, Imaculee and seven other women took refuge in a 3’ by 3’ bathroom hidden behind a wardrobe in a pastor’s home. As the machete-wielding gunmen continued hunting for more victims, Imaculee and the women remained in their cloister in silence. Her 91 days in hiding is a testimony of endurance and resilience in the face of unrestrained evil.
When everyone you love is dead, and everything you love is lost, how do you go on? Imaculee found the answer in faith, love, forgiveness, and optimism. It is a haunting story of an ordinary woman and earthly mortal forced into an enlightening spiritual experience with the…
Immaculee Ilibagiza grew up in a country she loved, surrounded by a family she cherished. But in 1994 her idyllic world was ripped apart as Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide. Immaculee's family was brutally murdered during a killing spree that lasted three months and claimed the lives of nearly a million Rwandans.
Incredibly, Immaculee survived the slaughter. For 91 days, she and seven other women huddled silently together in the cramped bathroom of a local pastor while hundreds of machete-wielding killers hunted for them. It was during those endless hours of unspeakable terror that Immaculee discovered the power of…
After working as a foreign correspondent in Italy and France I was sent by Reuters news agency to Cote d’Ivoire and what was then Zaire, the latter posting coinciding with the shocking start of the genocide in neighboring Rwanda. It was the kind of assignment you don’t forget, and when I moved to the Financial Times I continued following the larger-than-life dramas unfolding in Africa’s Great Lakes region. I’ve now written five books, the first – In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz - about Mobutu Sese Seko's imprint on the Democratic Republic of Congo and the latest – Do Not Disturb - looking at personalities and events I first started writing about a quarter of a century ago. You keep going back.
The author, a Tutsi genocide survivor, was once a young Rwandan politician who deeply admired Paul Kagame and seemed destined for prominent public office. Instead, from his position as parliamentary speaker, he watched as his hero steadily emasculated the judiciary, undermined the country’s Hutu president – a symbol of ethnic reconciliation - and sabotaged parliamentary democracy itself, eventually fleeing the country when his own life was threatened. His book not only offers great insights into the workings of village life in a tiny African country traumatized by its violent past, it’s a step-by-step analysis of how a dictatorship takes cynical, relentless hold.
Joseph Sebarenzi’s parents, seven siblings, and countless other family members were among 800,000 Tutsi brutally murdered over the course of ninety days in 1994 by extremist Rwandan Hutu—an efficiency that exceeded even that of the Nazi Holocaust. His father sent him away to school in Congo as a teenager, telling him, “If we are killed, you will survive.” When Sebarenzi returned to Rwanda after the genocide, he was elected speaker of parliament, only to be forced into a daring escape again when he learned he was the target of an assassination plot.
I’m interested in the lives and experiences of refugees and the policies and processes that support, protect, and obstruct them. I’m also interested in cities–how and why they attract people, the dangers and prospects they offer, and the unique way in which humanitarianism happens (or doesn’t happen) there. I’m an interdisciplinary academic who has spent years researching these issues and more.
We can learn a lot about urban refugees from works of fiction. This short story is a tragic tale of Boniface Louis R. Kuseremane, a Rwandese prince, who finds himself in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.
The story does well to remind us that refugees come from all backgrounds and how quickly support and wealth can disappear. Nairobi initially exists as a stop-off on route to continued comforts in Europe, but the protagonist finds himself trapped on a downward spiral as his social and material privileges slip away.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is most well known for her beautifully written novels Dust and The Dragonfly Sea, but long before these, her short story Weight of Whispers won the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing.
I have always cringed to hear my book described as “self-help” because it sounds dry and instructive. I prefer to describe it as a series of therapy stories. Help comes from surprising sources and I love that we can find support in our own imaginative ways. A wonderful book will always be helpful emotionally, and great writers investigate our inner lives and motivations. It’s up to each of us to insist on living exciting lives and books remind us that it’s always possible to have a fresh experience. Self-help often means embracing the complexities. There is no magical solution for figuring out life but great books make living so much better.
DeSanctis is a witty and lyrical writer, and she observes the world with astonishing acuity and insight.
I read this at a moment of feeling unbearably stuck emotionally and I was transported to a worldly sense of fresh possibilities and rich adventures. Restlessness can be a superpower and finally I got validation for being a restless psychotherapist (a profession that prides itself on patience).
This book made me come alive and it bolstered me psychologically in a way that felt incidental and not forced the way self-help books might. It sparked my appreciation for oddities and eccentricities and I urge anyone looking for mischief to start reading this immediately.
"Intrepid and empathetic, gifted with the dispassionate gaze of a born observer...a harmonious collage of worldview and character, a wunderkammer of experiences in a life fully lived." -Melissa Febos, The New York Times
"DeSanctis encounters spies and love interests, but it's her
lushly polished writing that makes this book a joy to read." -The Washington
Post
Vogue's Best Books of 2022
The Washington Post's Best Travel Books of 2022
Restless to leave, eager to return: this memoir in essays captures the unrelenting pull between the past and the present, between traveling the world and staying home.
After working as a foreign correspondent in Italy and France I was sent by Reuters news agency to Cote d’Ivoire and what was then Zaire, the latter posting coinciding with the shocking start of the genocide in neighboring Rwanda. It was the kind of assignment you don’t forget, and when I moved to the Financial Times I continued following the larger-than-life dramas unfolding in Africa’s Great Lakes region. I’ve now written five books, the first – In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz - about Mobutu Sese Seko's imprint on the Democratic Republic of Congo and the latest – Do Not Disturb - looking at personalities and events I first started writing about a quarter of a century ago. You keep going back.
So many books have been written about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda since this came out, but for me it still effortlessly holds its own: clear, accessible, immensely insightful in the way it traces cause and effect. Make sure you buy the second edition, though, as French historian Prunier revised some key views over the years, including his opinion on who brought down the plane in which two African presidents died – the incident that triggered the genocide. The book is the perfect companion piece for Prunier’s follow-up tome, which pans back to examine not just Rwanda but the entire Great Lakes region during the turbulent post-genocide years: “From Genocide to Continental War. The “Congolese” Conflict and the Crisis of Contemporary Africa.”
In the spring of 1994 the tiny African nation of Rwanda exploded onto the international media stage, as internal strife reached genocidal proportions. But the horror that unfolded before our eyes had been building steadily for years before it captured the attention of the world. In The Rwanda Crisis, journalist and Africa scholar Gerard Prunier provides a historical perspective that Western readers need to understand how and why the brutal massacres of 800,000 Rwandese came to pass. Prunier shows how the events in Rwanda were part of a deadly logic, a plan that served central political and economic interests, rather…
Over the course of my so-called career as a travel writer, the ‘I’ve-Got-A Big-One’ school favoured by the male of the species has ceded ground. Women, less interested in ‘conquering,’ have pioneered a kind of creative non-fiction that suits the travel genre. I prefer it to the blokeish business of seeing how dead you can get. It notices more. As the decades unfurled – Pole to Pole, via Poland – I realised, more and more, the debt I owe to the other women who not only set sail but also unsparingly observed the world that turns within each self.
Dervla Murphy (1931-2022) was queen of the road when I started out. I learnt a lot from her.
Visiting Rwanda is probably my top pick among her many travelogues but her best book by far, in my opinion, is the autobiographical Wheels within Wheels. "I had been brought up to understand," Murphy writes, "that material possessions and physical comfort should never be confused with success, achievement and security."
I had been brought up to understand the opposite, and this book showed me, as I tackled a travel memoir of my own, that like Murphy I must take those crucial lessons as a starting point.
As a cultural anthropologist, I'm like a cultural detective, exploring the intricate and often heart-wrenching world of war, conflict, and population displacement. But before you envision me in a dusty library, let me share that I found my passion for unraveling the everyday, lived experiences of war while living in Ukraine, where I became close to incredible individuals whose lives had been profoundly altered by war. When people shared with me how Russian aggression was tearing apart their cherished friendships and family bonds, I knew I had to delve into the profound effects of war on personal relationships. So, here I am, on a mission to illuminate the hidden stories, and the untold struggles, that are so important.
This novel about a girl’s flight from Rwanda is gripping.
She vividly captures how perceptions of risk are radically altered by war, how grief and trauma may take years to fully understand, and why we should not pity survivors but respect their strength. These are lessons I learned firsthand as a result of my research in Ukraine and that I also describe, in an expository style.
An important theme in this book, and one I explore at length in my own, is that once separated by politics or geography, family and friendships are difficult to re-knit. A lesson from the current war in Ukraine, then, is that infrastructure will be far easier to repair than the interpersonal ruins. Similarly, Wamariya eventually finds her parents, but everything has changed.
A riveting story of dislocation, survival, and the power of stories to break or save us
When Clemantine Wamariya was six years old, her world was torn apart. She didn't know why her parents began talking in whispers, or why her neighbours started disappearing, or why she could hear distant thunder even when the skies were clear.
As the Rwandan civil war raged, Clemantine and her sister Claire were forced to flee their home. They ran for hours, then walked for days, not towards anything, just away. they sought refuge where they could find it, and escaped when refuge became…
