Intimate Enemy – Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide - Hardcover

Lyons, Robert; Strauss, Scott

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1890951633 ISBN 13: 9781890951634

Publisher: Zone Books – MIT, 2006

Synopsis

Testimony and photographs from the Rwandan genocide, providing a rare look at both perpetrators and survivors.

In 1994, an interim government in Rwanda orchestrated one of the world's worst mass crimes: a 100-day extermination campaign that took half a million lives. At the time, Rwanda's genocide went largely unnoticed by the outside world. Today there is growing interest in the Rwandan experience as many discover the horror that took place and seek to understand how and why violence of this character and magnitude could have happened in our time.

Intimate Enemy is a rare entrée into the logic, language, and imagery of Rwanda's violence. The book presents perpetrator testimony along with photographs of Rwandans, both perpetrators and survivors. The images and words are raw and unanalyzed; the reader is left to make sense of the killers and their would-be victims. Intimate Enemy challenges our assumptions about the genocide and about those who perpetrated it. It also prods us to consider how to represent and imagine violence on the scale of Rwanda.

About this title

About the Authors

Photographer Robert Lyons is the author of two notable books on Africa. Another Africa is an exploration, with writer Chinua Achebe, of the real Africa behind the stereotypes commonly held by Westerners; Egyptian Time is a collection of photographs of Egypt and its people, accompanied by Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz's short story "The Cradle."

Scott Straus is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of several books on Africa and violence, including The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda, and is the translator of Jean-Pierre Chretien's The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History. Formerly a Nairobi-based journalist, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his 1996 reporting on the war in Congo.

Edition details

• Publisher: Zone Books – MIT
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1890951633
• ISBN 13: 9781890951634
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 188