“I heard the killers call my name. I cowered in the corner of our tiny secret bathroom. My mind echoed with one thought: If they catch me, they will kill me.”
Immaculée Ilibagiza, a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, writes about her escape from racial slaughter in her autobiography, “Left to Tell.” Ilibagiza’s raw portrayal of a nation afflicted with hate-animated chaos compels readers to reflect on human nature in an unconventional and moving way. Themes we love at Hillsdale—the necessity of virtue, the nature of regimes, and reason ruling passions—permeate this contemporary version of “The Diary of Anne Frank.”
Hillsdale requires incoming freshmen to study these themes on a theoretical level by reading a biography of George Washington and a portion of Aristotle’s “Nichomachean Ethics.” Instead of boggling yet-untrained minds, future Hillsdalians should be required to engage the ideas of virtue and reason through the story of a woman who has experienced what happens when those ideas aren’t applied as Aristotle would have liked. “Left to Tell” should be required reading for incoming Hillsdale freshman.
Racial tensions have historically plagued the small central-African nation of Rwanda. Despite a mutual language and culture, the Hutu majority and Tutsi minority have long struggled over political authority. Ilibagiza was born Tutsi, bearing all the physical distinctions: height, lighter skin tone, and an elegant neck. During the genocide, these traits became her death warrant.
At 22, Ilibagiza was studying engineering at the National University of Rwanda. When racial tensions began to rise following the assassination of the Hutu president by Tutsi rebels, her father begged her to return to her rural village home. There, her brother delivered the news: “I saw the Hutu killers. They have a list of names of all the Tutsi families, and our names are on it! They are planning to kill everyone on the list!”
It was April 7th, 1994. The genocide had begun.
Desperate to spare his only daughter from rape and murder, Ilibagiza’s father sent her to hide at the local Hutu pastor’s home. When two dozen Hutu men attacked her village, Ilibagiza and seven other Tutsi women were shown to their quarters: a 3-by-4 foot bathroom. One small window allowed sparse daylight. The women filed into the refuge, the door closing behind them.
They would remain in the bathroom for 91 days.
Armed with machetes, nail-studded clubs, and spears, hundreds of Hutus soon surrounded the house, dancing like madmen. “Kill the old and kill the young,” they chanted. “A baby snake is still a snake, let none escape!” They ravaged the home, searching for the women. For three months, they came time and time again. Ilibagiza watched Hutu butchers dismember and decapitate her Tutsi neighbors through the bathroom window. In 100 days of killing, the Hutus murdered 800,000 people.
Ilibagiza poses provocative questions about the causes of the bloody conflict. “It wasn’t the soldiers who were chanting,” Ilibagiza writes. “These were my neighbors, people I’d grown up with. How was it possible for a heart to harden so quickly?” Ilibagiza’s faith led her to believe that the evil, inherent in man’s nature, was cultivated by hatred and eventually brought her neighbors to murder.
Years of inculcating violence through a political system based on race and discrimination created a tinderbox. Radio propaganda encouraging the extermination of all “cockroaches,” as the Hutu government called the Tutsis, ignited the racial fire. The nature of a regime, and the principles it centers on, matters because it impacts its citizens’ character. The killers did not have ordered souls and allowed base passions to rule their actions.
These lessons—the need for virtue, the nature of regimes, and necessity for reason to rule the passions of men—can be taught on a theoretical level. We could require incoming freshman to read Aristotle. Or, we can convey these ideas through the vivid story of a woman who experienced the applications of these ideas and their implications.
When Ilibagiza emerged from hiding, she weighed a skeletal 65 pounds. Clinging to the one thing she owned, her father’s rosary, she stumbled into a French refugee camp. There, she learned that two of her three brothers and both parents were dead. Years later, Ilibagiza met the man who murdered her family and did the unthinkable: she forgave him. “I wept at the sight of his suffering,” she explained at a recent lecture at the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy. “He was now the victim of his victims, destined to live in torment and regret.”
April 17th, 2013, nineteen years after huddling in the bathroom, Immaculée Ilibagiza became an American citizen. “I feel American,” she said in a New York Daily News interview. “I feel free—I feel like I am born again. I feel like I have a home again.”
