Reading Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi: Book of Bones in a time of Boko Haram

Diop wrote the novel after “touring” Rwanda for two months in 1998 with nine other African writers. Fiona McLaughlin in the introduction to her 2006 English-language translation of the French-language novel writes that these literary writers determined to “bear collective witness to one of the most horrifying tragedies of the twentieth century.” This idea of […]

Diop wrote the novel after “touring” Rwanda for two months in 1998 with nine other African writers. Fiona McLaughlin in the introduction to her 2006 English-language translation of the French-language novel writes that these literary writers determined to “bear collective witness to one of the most horrifying tragedies of the twentieth century.” This idea of “bearing witness,” as it relates to Rwanda and—closer to home—the crisis in northern Nigeria, has haunted me since reading the novel. Although the context of the Boko Haram insurgency is quite different from the genocide that swept Rwanda, there are many similarities in the sheer madness and brutality of it and in the way so many people, even those in neighbouring states, have turned away and refused to look at what is happening—at least, not until it touches them.
Murambi is narrated through the voices of multiple narrators, both perpetrators and victims. The character that unifies these voices is that of Cornelius, a history teacher and writer who returns from his adopted home in Djibouti to Rwanda four years after receiving news that his Hutu father, his Tutsi mother and his two siblings had been killed during the genocide. He returns to Rwanda to see his only surviving relative Uncle Simeon and to somehow come to terms with what has happened to his family and his country. He finds that he is implicated in ways he never imagined, realizing his history and his future is inextricably linked to one of the worst massacres of the genocide at Murambi Technical School. There between 45 to 50,000 people who had sought refuge at the college were slaughtered when French troops withdrew protection. Murambi forms the core of the book around which all the other voices circle, bearing witness.
A French colonel who helps one of the Hutu perpetrators escape remembers how his colleagues complained that helping the killers escape is “our only option. If there’s a trial, they can try and save their skins by putting everything on us. We’re literally stuck.” The man attempts to absolve himself and France of responsibility for what happened as they stood by and did nothing. Colonel Etienne responds: “A genocide is a genocide … and this one will be the same. The more time passes, the less we’ll forget.”
He is right. The world mourns the Rwandan genocide twenty years later, but at the time that it was happening, those outside the country hardly paid attention—just as so many ignore what is happening in northern Nigeria today. Most recently, the Nigerian social media exploded with denunciations of the killings in the north only after the bomb exploded in Nyanya on the outskirts of Abuja on Monday—closer to home for the majority of tweeters than “remote” villages in Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa. And although girls in the northeast have been kidnapped for months, it was only with the spectacular kidnapping of 129 girls Monday night that the incidents began to make international headlines. I, too, am implicated. Busy as I am with my thesis and teaching, I have not written enough about it. It was only after I was convicted by reading Murambi that I began trying to explain the Boko Haram horror to my American students.
I find the words of the first narrator Michel Seremundo especially powerful. Michel, a Tutsi video shop owner who specializes in war movies, remembers seeing television news about violence in other parts of the world. “I didn’t realize that if the victims shouted loud enough, it was so that I would hear them, myself and thousands of other people on earth, and so we would try to do everything we could so that their suffering might end. It always happened so far away, in countries on the other side of the world. But in these early days of April in 1994, the country on the other side of the world is mine.” And just as he once looked away from the violence elsewhere, he knows that now he and his family will suffer in silence: “The World Cup was about to begin in the United States. The planet was interested in nothing else. And in any case, whatever happened in Rwanda, it would always be the same old story of blacks beating up on each other. Even Africans would say, during half-time of every match, ‘They’re embarrassing us, they should stop killing each other like that.’ Then they’ll go on to something else.” Michel’s story reminds us that the suffering of one human being should be the concern of all. Yet, too often, we merely shake our heads in pity. This is what Cornelius faces in Djibouti where his friends, “invited him to step back: ‘Yes, it’s all terrible,’ they said, ‘but there is life after the genocide, it’s time to move on.’”
Yet how does one “move on” after an outbreak of hell on earth? Cornelius’s friend Jessica tells him, “I was mad with rage seeing all those heaps of dead bodies in Kigali. But you know all too well, after the genocide, life continued. They massacre people somewhere else, and we feel helpless. That’s what’s terrible: we can’t do anything. It would take an entire lifetime. Our days are so short and the killers have so much more energy than decent people!”
When Cornelius returns to Rwanda in 1998, he finds that the new Tutsi-led government has made attempts to change policies that led to the genocide, such as taking ethnicity off of ID cards, but his friend Stanley points out that ultimately only justice will bring healing: “The genocide didn’t begin on the sixth of April 1994, but in 1959 through little massacres that no-one paid attention to. If there are politically motivated murders today, they need to punish the culprits straightaway. Otherwise, all that blood will be visited upon us again one day or another.”
 “The real problem is the mechanics of power in Africa,” Stanley posits, where political elite are not held responsible for their greed and their sponsorship of violence. As he visits the gigantic home of one of the organizers of the genocide who had escaped the country with the help of French Forces, Cornelius thinks, “Our problem isn’t our poverty, but our rich people.”
The novel continuously returns to the idea of documenting and witnessing as a precursor to justice. When Cornelius visits Murambi, he insists on seeing every mummified body that is displayed there, even though, as his guide notes, the hundreds of bodies all look the same. My student Cady Roedl in responding to the passage points out that Cornelius’s insistence on seeing all the bodies is a way of giving them respect. Cornelius realizes “each one of these corpses had a life that was different from that of all the others, each one had dreamed and navigated between doubt and hope, between love and hate.” Cornelius’s insistence on seeing each body, his refusal to turn away from the horror is one way of insisting that justice must be done. Cornelius determines “to call a monster by its name….He would tirelessly recount the horror.”
The novel was published before Rwanda instituted the local gacaca courts, a truth and reconciliation process that enabled thousands of victims and perpetrators awaiting justice to give their testimony to their own communities. The courts seemed to follow the philosophy proposed by Cornelius’s uncle Simeon, who warns his community against retaliation:  “you have suffered, but that doesn’t make you any better than those who made you suffer. They are people like you and me. Evil is within each one of us.… you are not better than them.”
In realizing the common humanity in both perpetrator and victim, Rwanda seems to have “recovered” remarkably well. Yet Murambi leaves us with questions about how anyone can really “move on” past such a history and gives us words with which to think about how we address what is happening in Nigeria today. Where are the witnesses? Where is the justice? What must be done to drive back these killers who seem to have given up their humanity without losing our own?