In this paper I explore Jean-Marie Ndagijimana’s strange memoir, Bujumbura Mon Amour (2005), a partisan, but also poignant, portrait of an ethnic ideologue, with strong sympathies for the Hutu Power movement that fomented the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The memoir confronts readers with a difficult moral challenge: how to read the autobiography of a genocide apologist? To the extent that autobiography is frequently an explication and therefore potentially an exculpation of its author’s motives, what legitimacy should one accord the sentiments and memories articulated there? Conversely, what weight does one accord the cumulative sense of injustice and humiliation fostered here that pave the way to an enduring and venomous ethnic rage. Poised as it is between memoir, manifesto and jeremiad, lurching between conciliation and condemnation, Bujumbura presents a complex interpretive challenge as one struggles to understand its narrative of radicalization and parse its contradictory motives and intentions.
Ndagijimana was Rwanda’s ambassador throughout Rwanda’s civil war, from the time of Kagame’s 1990 invasion from Uganda until President Habyarimana’s assassination on April 6, 1994. Ndagijimana was therefore an elite member of Habyarimana’s MRND party during the entire era dominated by the civil war, the internal rise of Hutu Power extremism and the grooming of the Interahamwe militias that would be instrumental in executing the genocide. After the triumph of Kagame’s RPF forces in late 1994, Ndagijimana was also briefly regarded as a sufficiently moderate party to be included in a post-genocide alliance of national reconciliation although he quit his post only months after taking it and fled into exile. After his departure from Rwanda, Ndagijimana’s invective against the Rwandan regime has grown steadily more shrill. Among Ndagijimana’s recent publications is a work titled, How Paul Kagame Deliberately Sacrificed the Tutsis (2010)- a title that leaves little room to speculate about its thesis. One might therefore expect from Bujumbura Mon Amour a stridently partisan assertion of Hutu identity and an inventory of human rights violations committed by the Tutsi minority and in this 2005 memoir, Ndagijimana does not disappoint on either count. While it sets out trying to remain above the fray, pledging itself to “la Justice et la Vérité”, it devolves into a rant against Tutsi perfidy.
The memoir is a denunciation of the repeated persecution and slaughter of the Hutu population by the Tutsi-dominated military in Burundi where Ndagijimana was a student in the early 1970s. Ndagijimana’s memoir affords unique testimony against the forgotten genocide unleashed on the Hutu majority of Burundi during the summer of 1972, a genocide that has been eclipsed by the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. As we devote attention to the Rwandan genocide, we also inevitably fail to grasp that atrocity without also revisiting the rancid legacy generated by the 1972 slaughter of nearly a quarter million Hutus in Burundi, or, even more urgently, the assassination in October 1993 of Melchior Ndadaye, Burundi’s first democratically elected Hutu president during a Tutsi-led military coup. That the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda continues to receive attention from the international community, while the genocide of the Hutu in Burundi remains forgotten and practically unknown, continues to be a source of rancor within Hutu communities both at home and abroad, stoking the ethnic resentment and bitterness expressed throughout Ndagijimana’s work. This memoir offers a rare window into the Bildung or apprenticeship of anti-‘Hamitism’—a portrait of the genocidaire as a young man-- through a lifetime of ethnic persecution, humiliation and insult.
Bujumbura Mon Amour takes readers inside the turbulent summer of the Burundian genocide. Ndagijimana remembers the horrifying experiences through which he becomes ethnically radicalized. More significantly, his memoir also underscores the traumatic blow Ndadaye’s overthrow was to the Hutu people just months after his election. It makes clear that the death of Ndadaye had deep repercussions in Hutu communities across the entire Great Lakes region. Ndagijimana’s memoir is undeniably and raucously angry but also wistful and elegiac. It offers readers the complex dilemma of responding to a cri du coeur demanding compassion and justice and yet at the same time serving as a vehicle for the unabating exchange of ethnic grievances and reproaches in the region. Bujumbura Mon Amour is an indispensable document for deciphering the secret history of ethnic suspicions that continue to divide communities in Rwanda, Burundi and the eastern Congo.