"Le Convoi" de Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, qui sort mercredi, est un livre rare : un témoignage d'une survivante du génocide au Rwanda, peu nombreux jusqu'à présent à susciter l'intérêt des éditeurs et des lecteurs.
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00:00 The Convoy of Beata Humu Bieyim-Héresse, which comes out on Wednesday, is a rare book, a testimony of a survivor of the genocide in Rwanda, few so far to arouse the interest of publishers and readers.
00:11 Nearly 30 years after the events and the more than 800,000 deaths between April and July 1994, mainly among the Tutsi minority, but also among the moderate Hutus, the books are not missing from Rwanda.
00:23 The works of the Franco-Rwandan Solastic Mukasonga "Notre Dame du Nil", Pri Renaudot 2012 and Gaël Fay "Petit Pays", success of 2016, are references, but fiction of authors who were not in Rwanda at the time of the genocide.
00:36 Most of the stories of witnesses or essays are signed by authors who are not Rwandan. Especially French journalists and men.
00:44 Those of Jean Hatzfeld "A Season of Machetes" in 2003 and its sequels immediately come to mind. The last of the year 2023, "Nurabeo" at the end of October, was a novel by another reporter, Pierre Lepidi.
00:57 The first to be released in 2024, on January 5, "Les C'est le Papa", "Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au Rwanda?" "France face to genocide" is still the work of a French journalist, Laurent Larcher.
01:09 Why? Beata Unubiei Meres, now a Franco-Rwandan living in Bordeaux, a child of the city of Butar, in southern Rwanda, has no explanation at all.
01:20 "I want to send the question back to the Western readers. Do we trust someone who is like us more?" she asks in turn, questioned by AFP.
01:30 "Hidden in a truck." This author publishes at Flammarion, a prestigious house in Paris, and has been questioned in Le Quotidien Le Monde. She had previously done her homework in fiction.
01:41 Her novels are called "All the Children Dispersed", on genocide, and "Eux consolés", in the pocket on Wednesday, also on exile forced by colonizers.
01:50 The other Rwandans who published testimonies of refugees did not have the same luck, with often smaller publishing houses. The books by Révérien Rurangwa, "Génocidé", 2006, and Anik Khaïtzi-Josan, another native of Butar, "Nous existons encore", 2004, and "Eux-mêmes Dieu ne veut pas s'en mêler", 2017, have had some repercussions.
02:11 Those of Albert Nangimana, "Ma mère m'a tué", 2019, or Charles Abonimana, "Moi, le dernier Tutsi", 2019, much less. And others not at all.
02:22 Beata Umubiei Mérès was 14 when this genocide began. Of Polish father and mother Tutsi, she owes her life to two miracles.
02:30 First, when militiamen were about to kill her, she had the idea to claim that she was French, which she was not. Her instruction in a Belgian school made it possible to believe it.
02:41 Then, she left Rwanda for Burundi thanks to the Swiss National Army of Men, hidden in a truck in a humanitarian convoy for children who were not supposed to transport her, her and her mother.
02:52 What do we want to do now?