Machete Season

Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak (2003), by French journalist Jean Hatzfeld, presents ten accounts of ordinary contributors to the Rwandan genocide, which killed 800,000 Tutsis in just two months in 1994. Each survivor is from the same relatively small city and goes into depth about the neighbors they murdered (or helped murder). The work was first translated into English by Linda Coverdale.

Its themes include personal responsibility, the horrors of groupthink, and mass dehumanization. The title comes from the “season” of killing, as well as the machetes, usually used for farming, that the Hutu used to kill the Tutsi, averaging 10,000 murders a day.

The nine men interviewed in-depth are from the majority Hutu population. When Hatzfeld spoke with them in 2001-2002, they were all in jail or reeducation camps, having been convicted of murder.

Like most in the town of Nyamata, they hated the minority Tutsi population and were dedicated to genocide. In just two months, the Hutu killed 50,000 Tutsis in this region, or about 85 percent of the total Tutsi population in the valley area.

Machete Season opens with Rose Kubwimana, an elderly Hutu woman, going through her morning routine the morning of what would become the Rwandan genocide.