Left to Tell by Steve Erwin
"Left to Tell" by Immaculée Ilibagiza is a poignant memoir that recounts her harrowing experience during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, where she survived as one of the few Tutsis able to evade death at the hands of Hutu extremists. The narrative unfolds with Ilibagiza's childhood and her gradual awareness of the ethnic tensions that would later engulf her life. Amidst the mass killings that claimed nearly a million lives, she and several other women were hidden by a Hutu pastor in a cramped bathroom, where they endured unimaginable conditions while relying on prayer and their faith for survival.
Ilibagiza’s story also serves as a spiritual guidebook, emphasizing themes of forgiveness, love, and the transformative power of faith. Despite the overwhelming trauma of losing her family, she demonstrates the strength derived from her belief in God, ultimately advocating for forgiveness even toward those who committed horrific acts. Through her journey, Ilibagiza conveys a powerful message about the potential for healing and peace, highlighting the capacity for love to transcend hatred. Her account not only sheds light on the brutality of the genocide but also emphasizes the importance of hope and resilience in the face of despair.
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Left to Tell by Steve Erwin
First published: Carlsbad, Calif.: Hay House, 2006
Genre(s): Nonfiction
Subgenre(s): Autobiography
Core issue(s): Africa; forgiveness; good vs. evil; peace; prayer; racism; salvation; trust in God
Overview
Left to Tell, a firsthand account of the Rwandan genocide, describes Immaculée Ilibagiza’s experience of being one of the few members of the Tutsi tribe to avoid being massacred at the hands of the Hutu tribe in 1994. It also is a spiritual guidebook, offering inspiration from tragedy, and demonstrates how faith in God can give strength when hope would otherwise die.
Ilibagiza begins her account by discussing her childhood, explaining that she did not know she was a Tutsi, or even what a Tutsi was, until she went to school, where she encountered the government’s ethnic roll calls and a teacher who would turn out to be one of the most malignant haters of her tribe. She explains that the Hutu government’s ethnic balance, which ensured that most of the jobs and scholarships went to the majority Hutu population, nearly prevented her from going past the eighth grade. Her father had to sell two cows to pay for two years of private school tuition before she was finally awarded a high school scholarship. After high school, she also won a scholarship to attend a university, where she was studying in 1994 when the Hutu president was killed while trying to make peace with the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RFP), a Tutsi militia attempting to overthrow the government and back social equality bring to the country.
Ilibagiza had gone home to celebrate Easter with her Catholic family when the president’s plane was shot down and the extremist Hutu government swerved from its peace efforts and began massacring the Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The United Nations removed peacekeeping troops, and the international community turned a blind eye for three months while nearly one million Tutsis were killed, often with machetes. Ilibagiza’s father was a community leader, and people looked to him for safety when the killing began, but he refused to believe the government was behind the massacre, which was largely carried out by a group calling itself the Interahamwe. He was murdered when he went to ask for help from a Hutu official who had once been his friend.
Before his death, he sent his daughter (Ilibagiza), his younger son, and the son’s friend to the home of a neighboring pastor (Pastor Murinzi) to beg for concealment. The pastor hid Ilibagiza but would not keep her brother or his friend, believing the men could fend for themselves but the women would be raped, tortured, and murdered. The Hutu pastor hid seven Tutsis in his tiny extra bathroom, concealing them even from his family by pushing a wardrobe in front of the door and feeding them scraps of food that the servants had thrown in the trash. The women could stand up only one at a time, could flush the toilet only at the exact same time as another toilet was being flushed, and became infested with lice because they could not use the shower.
Through the bathroom’s outside wall, the women could hear Hutus slashing Tutsis with machetes. They heard one woman killed, then had to listen while her infant cried for a day until it also died. The pastor turned on the radio in his bedroom on the other side of the bathroom door so that they could hear outside news, and they heard Hutu hate propaganda and transmissions by the British Broadcasting Corporation describing mass graves and reeking stacks of bodies.
Ultimately, every member of Ilibagiza’s immediate family, except an older brother who was studying in Senegal, was killed. In the three months spent in the cramped bathroom, Ilibagiza devoted herself to prayer to overcome her own despair. She believed God blinded the Hutu extremists to the women’s existence and told her to learn English so she could work for the United Nations and tell her story when the murders stopped. Ilibagiza was convinced that she had been left alive to tell what she had seen, and through prayer, she came to rely entirely on God for her rescue, knowing that her salvation was already assured.
After leaving the pastor’s bathroom when the worst of the killing was over, Ilibagiza stayed for a time in a French refugee camp, where her bilingual abilities, in her native Rwandan tongue, Kinyarwanda, and French, proved essential to helping many Tutsis reach refuge. She also encountered an old family friend who had a letter for her from an older brother who attempted to flee to Zaire but was caught and murdered. (Indeed, Ilibagiza had overheard the details of his death when one of the pastor’s sons, just beyond the bathroom’s outside wall, told a friend about the slaying of a man with a master’s degree. Ilibagiza felt certain then that she knew the victim’s identity because her brother was one of the few men in the area to hold a master’s degree.) She saw piles of corpses stacked by the roadside, so thick and rotted they were nearly unrecognizable, and swore to relate this and the brutality she witnessed firsthand to the rest of the world.
Christian Themes
Forgiveness dominates all other themes in this work. While hiding in the bathroom, Ilibagiza struggled to forgive the Hutu killers perpetuating the genocide. She struggled to forgive Pastor Murinzi for refusing to shelter her younger brother, reviling her father, and believing lies about her family, even as he protected her and the other women from certain death. After the gruesome sight of her older brother’s skull caused Ilibagiza to faint, she rode past Hutu homes fighting with herself not to let hate rule her heart. By comparing the Hutu killers to children, she was able to forgive them. She acknowledged that all people are God’s children and prayed for God to forgive the Hutu killers. When the genocide ended, she traveled to see the man who had murdered her father and was now imprisoned by the Tutsis in order to forgive him.
To achieve forgiveness, she prayed fervently throughout her time in the bathroom and after, achieving a new level of trust in God, even in the depths of misery. Indeed, Ilibagiza believed her survival depended on the Lord. She experienced direct revelations, with Jesus telling her in a dream that most of her family and friends would be dead when she left the bathroom but that she herself would be fine. She also believed God inspired her to ask Pastor Murinzi to conceal the bathroom door with his wardrobe. After moving on to the French refugee camp for Tutsis, she again relied on divine intervention to survive. The withdrawing French abandoned the remaining Tutsi refugees a mile from the nearest RFP camp, in the midst of a group of the Interahamwe, and Ilibagiza prayed that God would not let her and her thirty companions be slaughtered. When the entire party was safe with the Tutsi soldiers, another of the refugees told her to keep praying because the Interahamwe seemed frozen and unable to move while Ilibagiza went for help.
This work is important to the canon of Christian literature not only because it chronicles Ilibagiza’s survival against seemingly insurmountable odds but also because its message of forgiveness and faith utterly transcends the horrors of the genocide. Ilibagiza’s account contrasts the depths of human depravity with the heights of God’s love. She ultimately argues that only love can end hatred and only forgiveness can bring peace.
Sources for Further Study
Dallaire, Roméo, and Brent Beardsley. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2003. Ilibagiza mentions Dallaire’s heroic refusal to withdraw when the United Nations pulled out peacekeeping forces. He here recounts his experiences during the genocide.
Fisanick, Christina, ed. The Rwanda Genocide. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2004. Essays discussing the socioeconomic factors precipitating the genocide and Rwanda’s social and economic condition after.
Hatzfeld, Jean. Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak—A Report. Translated by Linda Coverdale. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Interviews with and an analysis of the behaviors of nine of the Hutu killers. Suggests genocide can be perpetuated by ordinary individuals.
Melvern, Linda. A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide. New York: Zed Books, 2006. Developed nations refused to acknowledge the genocide and allowed it to continue. Melvern analyzes this refusal and places it in context.
Prunier, Gérard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Overview of Rwandan culture prior to the genocide and analysis of the first months following.