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career back as I was completing my master’s degree, in 1992, I was distracted by Africa. I was not

ready to settle down in Nova Scotia, where I had been born and raised, and certainly was not keen on

the desk jobs my friends were choosing. I wanted to go abroad and experience a part of the world that

was rarely discussed in the lecture halls of my undergraduate political science courses but featured

frequently on the evening news. The first Iraq war was raging at the time, and I was glued to CNN,

whose reporting largely centered on the war in Somalia and the end of the apartheid regime in South

Africa—topics that were framed as representative of the continent of Africa. I had yet to realize that

the Africa reporting of major North American news outlets provided coverage of African events only

in ways that would appeal to Western audiences. I knew only of an amorphous yet singular “Africa”

that existed in the images and pages of English-language reports. I also did not appreciate that

Western reporting on Africa was skewed in such a way that it both produced and reinforced

stereotypes of the “dark” continent as a place of ethnic violence, famine, corruption, and big-man

politics. Indeed, I did not even question how reporting on Africa could be anything but inaccurate

given that the continent was at that time made up of fifty-three countries, covering a geographic area

almost four times the size of the continental United States. I would not turn over in my mind how I

learned about Africa and what it meant for my work in Rwanda and elsewhere for another few years.

Instead, I busied myself in securing a full-time position with the United Nations (UN) in East

Africa. I believed in the UN as an organization dedicated to the security and development of

individuals and states alike. I knew where this idea came from: as a Canadian, I learned in social

studies classes in middle and high school that former prime minister Lester Pearson was the

grandfather of modern peacekeeping—the quintessential Canadian value. That the UN was more often

than not a source of insecurity in the lives of the civilians it claimed to protect would become clear to

me soon enough. The civil war in Somalia was under way, and my first posting was as a “Nation-

Building Officer” for the United Nations Mission to Somalia in Mogadishu starting in June 1993. The

UN did not have the slightest clue about what was actually going on at the local level, so the mission

ended shortly after Somali militias killed twenty-three Pakistani peacekeepers in July 1993. I took one

lesson away from my three-week stint in the field: local knowledge matters, and the UN did not seem

to have any access to it. It was quite the surprise to my young mind that local actors thought the UN an

illegitimate entity.

In September 1993 I started to work in cyclone-ravaged Madagascar. I was supposed to monitor the

gender dynamics of food distribution for ten months, but I completed only about three months of my

appointment. The monitoring of the food distribution took place in rural communities, sometimes as

far as forty or fifty miles off the main road. Madagascar has a rudimentary road network, and there is

only one paved link between Antananarivo, the capital, and Tamatave, an eastern port city. Repeated

cyclones in late 1993 washed the road away in many spots. Traveling the two hundred miles or so

between the two cities could take up to twelve hours in a four-by-four that ferried me back and forth

between “the office” (the UN office in Tamatave) and “the field.” Every morning, I would be dropped

off, with my translator, to trek from the main road back to the communities where I would spend my

days monitoring food distributions organized by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees

witnessed a murder. It was a surreal event, one that I struggled to make sense of for a long time.

One afternoon, my translator and I finished up about two hours early and had walked back to the

pickup spot on the main road. My translator lived in a nearby community and left me alone, which

was against UN policy as all staff members were supposed to check in at the office at the end of each

day. I sat on an outcrop of the volcanic rock that characterizes much of the landscape and watched the

comings and goings of foot traffic, motor bikes, private vehicles, and the UN pickups and four-by-

fours that all vied for space on the narrow, muddy main route, which was basically a strip of

cavernous potholes. There was a three-part funeral procession walking along the side of the road. The

younger men and relatives of the deceased walked up front, where the shrouded body was carried in a

burlap stretcher on the shoulders of six or eight men. Most of the population of the community walked

behind, with children, dogs, and goats bringing up the rear. Suddenly there was a thud and then loud

wailing and incessant screeching. The driver of a Renault 4 had hit a boy at the back of the procession,

and it looked like he was badly injured. My heart pounded in my chest as I struggled to understand

what I had just seen. I witnessed angry pallbearers drop the body they were carrying to run back and

confront the driver. Loud, angry male voices filled the air. Time stood still as I watched the driver step

away from his car and cross his wrists as he stretched out his arms toward the approaching group. No

one seemed to be attending to the boy who had been hit by his car. Soon, I was off my perch and

looking for safety, scanning in the distance for my now long-gone translator. I looked on in horror as

the pallbearers began to dismember the driver. He yelped, and the crowd seemed to cheer. I saw his

arm fall to the ground. His death ended with decapitation.

It was well past sunset before my driver appeared, three hours late, as I sat in the dark, shaken and

alone, waiting for him to arrive. Those three hours felt like an eternity and I wondered if the dispatch

folks at my UN office even noticed that I had yet to return to base for the night. I also thought about

what I had just witnessed: obviously, what I had just seen was murder. But was it? It seemed so

controlled, so methodical. All the parties to the event seemed to have a defined role. Why would the

driver get out of his vehicle and offer himself with outstretched arms? Why did the rest of the

community cheer? What about the boy? I remained at the office for the next few days, in a state of

shock and unable to articulate my feelings. It took me three days to tell my boss what I had seen. He

was blasé about it. “Oh, okay. Um, you know that is how they solve problems between themselves.

The driver probably gave himself up.” I was dumbfounded. When I expressed my disbelief, he

continued, “What you witnessed is nothing unusual. The tribes around here operate in an eye-for-an-

eye way. The boy got killed, so the driver gave himself up to avoid turmoil between his tribe and the

other one.” This made some sense to me, vulnerable and shaken as I was from my experience.

Eventually, I broke down, unable to function in this remote area in a high-stress position. I was

medically evacuated to Sweden, where I underwent a period of “decompression”1 to help me process

the experience.

Following almost four months of therapy and rest, I had to undertake a trial mission, meaning a

short two- or three-week mission back to Africa to assess my ability to continue working with the UN.

I was still naively committed to the ideals of the United Nations that I learned in grade school. I was

given the choice to either travel to Malawi or Rwanda as my first return to the field since leaving

Madagascar. My UN handler, a German woman not much older than I was at the time, described both

countries as “easy,” with “good restaurants” and “pleasant people.” “You’ll have no troubles in either

country” was her succinct summary of their merits. No other information on the politics of either

country was provided, and I did not think to ask any questions about local conditions. My UN





colleagues overseeing my return to the field provided no information on the ongoing ceasefire in

Kigali, Rwanda’s capital; indeed, I had no inkling that Rwanda was on the precipice of mass political

violence that would end in genocide. So, I chose Rwanda, as only a twenty-three-year-old could,

because of its proximity to my residence in Kenya—the flight from Rwanda to Nairobi had one fewer

leg than the trip to Lilongwe, and I was eager to get home after an extended visit in Sweden. I arrived

in Rwanda on March 26, 1994, to follow a team from the United Nations Development Program on its

assessment of a women’s cooperative in Gitarama. The mission was to end April 13, 1994. When I

landed in Kigali, there was an obvious military presence as the civil war between the government and

the then rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was ongoing. But I had not been briefed on the political

situation and did not think much of the armed vehicles and the fifty-man troop patrols that walked the

city—that is what ceasefires look like, right? I hopped into another white UN four-by-four and was

taken to the office, where I met my team leader and was briefed on what we would be doing in and

around Gitarama, some thirty miles southwest of Kigali. What struck me most during our meetings

with the local cooperatives the UN was funding were the inequalities between the local representatives

and the broader membership. The leaders were clearly drawn from the economic and social elites,

given their covered shoes, stylish outfits, well-coiffed hairstyles, and perfect French. Ordinary peasant

women were usually barefoot, spoke only Kinyarwanda, wore threadbare clothes, and had their

children in tow. We never spoke to them, yet they were always present. I asked a few times during our

interviews if we could speak to our “beneficiaries,” but our hosts always replied with a polite “No,

they have nothing to say; they are poor, you see. Our job is to take care of them for the development of

the country.” I did not question the UN’s dismissal of these women as poor and thus without any

knowledge or opinion worth considering. I also knew nothing of President Juvénal Habyarimana’s

development initiatives, which I later learned were grounded in an ideology in which only ethnic Hutu

were the “real” peasants and that this ideology in part fueled the genocide that would engulf Rwanda

just a few days later. Everything I experienced during my first week in the country was filtered

through the lens of my UN colleagues and the local elites with whom we worked. I could see ordinary

peasants everywhere I went but had no way to interact with them or engage them as individuals as I

did not speak of a word of the local language, Kinyarwanda. Indeed, when I asked my UN boss why we

did not travel with a Kinyarwanda language translator so we could talk to local people, he replied that

it was not necessary to consult what the Rwandan authorities called “the masses” as their wellbeing

was the responsibility of the government, not the United Nations.

Around 10:30 p.m. on April 6, 1994, the genocide started. I was safely ensconced in the UN

headquarters in the center of Kigali. We had arrived back from Gitarama late and were still at the

office when I heard the crash that launched the genocide. Habyarimana was returning from peace talks

with the leadership of the then rebel RPF in Arusha, Tanzania, when his plane was shot down as it

approached Kigali International Airport. 2 All passengers on board were killed, including the president

of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira. Roadblocks were going up around the city, and we received word

from the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) to stay put. I spent the next five or six days in

the UN compound, waiting to be evacuated. The paralyzing fear I felt in Madagascar less than a year

prior flooded my system. I spent the next few days numb, without words and without reaction, largely

unaware and indeed unable to imagine the systematic and structured killing that was going on outside

the confines of the UN compound in Kigali. I gained a pretty good inkling when armed militia entered

forcibly and killed some Tutsi staff members, including the UN driver with whom I had spent the last

week. Their remains lay in the courtyard, and we had to step around and over their decomposing

bodies to get to the cars that would take us by road to Uganda some five days later. The reentry





mission to determine my ability to continue working for the UN would change my life. How could UN

personnel not have known what was going on in Rwanda? How could I have been sent to a country on

“the brink of civil war” (to quote the UN staffer who briefed us upon our safe arrival in Uganda)? The

answers were not that hard to find: Rwanda was the darling of the international community for its

commitment to good governance and economic development, and the implementation of the Arusha

Accords was progressing well.3 No one imagined a rupture as dramatic as genocide.

I returned to Nairobi in May 1994 to continue my work with the UN. But what I had experienced in

Kigali became a constant preoccupation, which was fed by erroneous reports that atavistic ethnic

hatred had erupted in Rwanda. Was it indeed genocide, as some sources were saying? How could

genocide happen among neighbors? The United States certainly refused to say it was, and American

inaction was a common theme of the reporting. Gruesome images of people dying by machete chop at

roadblocks were interspersed with images of mass graves as bloated, decomposing bodies were piled

high over one hundred days of genocide. The more I read, the less I knew. Since the RPF eventually

stopped the genocide with a military victory, I, like many others, perceived them as the “good guys.” I

wanted to help rebuild the “new” Rwanda.4 I first went to Ngara refugee camp in western Tanzania in

mid-1995 and worked there alongside a team of delegates from the International Committee of the

Red Cross (ICRC) who were investigating sexual violence in the camps. I had a naïve notion that

criminal prosecution was a necessary part of understanding and explaining the genocide. Interfering in

the lives of women who had lost everything seemed a good idea at the time. But the choice was

ultimately about me—I needed to feel that I was doing something to help. I would not understand until

years later that the help I offered was hardly the help people wanted or needed.

At the time, I was smitten with the RPF leadership. It had, after all, stopped the genocide, and for

me it was a clear-cut affair. Ethnic Hutu had killed innocent ethnic Tutsis as a result of deep-seated

hatred. That Hutu elites had manipulated ethnic identities for their own political and economic gain

and that the RPF would do the same had not even crossed my mind. I trusted RPF rhetoric about

socioeconomic inclusion for all Rwandans, not just RPF members. Like many others, I understood

pregenocide Rwanda to be a place of ethnic discrimination and hatred that had resulted in the 1994

massacres. At the same time, I believed in RPF promises of a Rwandan rebirth rooted in ethnic unity

and reconciliation. Their framing of the genocidal regime of then president Juvénal Habyarimana as

unscrupulous and corrupt made sense, and I believed Paul Kagame, then the de facto head of the RPF,

to be an ascetic, principled, and selfless leader. I suffered perhaps what many young people suffer, an

implicit confidence in the value of leadership and charismatic political leadership in particular as a

direct path to eliminate the structural conditions that result in unequal social, political, and economic

institutions. That the cult of personality surrounding RPF leaders, including Kagame, could result in

authoritarian rule was not something I would consider deeply until I witnessed firsthand the daily fear

and insecurity that ordinary Rwandans felt with respect to their political leaders. Instead, like many

others before and since, I understood postgenocide Rwanda through a narrow lens—that of the 1994

genocide, in which Hutu chauvinist leaders drove ordinary Hutu to commit acts of genocide against

Tutsi. The RPF, led by the capable and visionary Kagame, is the hero of the Rwandan tragedy.

I eventually moved to Rwanda in July 1997, working for the United Nations Human Rights Mission

for Rwanda (UNHRFOR). This was a ragtag bunch of young and often ambitious Westerners, with an

occasional West African national thrown into the mix. We spent our days interviewing Rwandans

about their experiences of violence since the genocide with the broad purpose of monitoring the

human rights situation in the country. It did not seem to matter very much that many of my colleagues

did not have the slightest clue what constituted a human rights abuse. Instead, we traipsed across the





country, with armed soldiers as our escorts, to speak to ordinary Rwandans about the violence they

had lived through or witnessed. We often met in hospitals, seeking to speak to people who had just

been victims of violence. The hospitals stank: a pungent mix of dried blood, festering machete

wounds, human waste, and charcoal smoke. Many of my UN colleagues would wait outside while

those of us who were willing would go interview weakened, vulnerable, and frightened Rwandans. It

did not take long to see that many of my colleagues were building careers, not caring for local people.

The power dynamics inherent in these interactions were an equally unexamined aspect of our work.

I resigned from the Mission less than two weeks later. My last assignment was to monitor the

public executions of twenty-two Rwandans at various sites across Rwanda. I witnessed the executions

in Kigali of six people, including one woman, at Nyamirambo soccer stadium. As their bodies

slumped over in the hail of bullets from six police AK-47s, I got really scared as many in the crowd

cheered, others danced, some wept, while others remained stone faced. I knew I would have to resign.

The situation in Rwanda was simply too complicated for me. I did not trust my UN colleagues to

support or care for me. I had already been confronted with the bureaucratic incompetence of the

United Nations. I could not image how public executions would facilitate national reconciliation in

such a climate. What I was seeing and hearing in the hills when we interviewed ordinary people made

no sense in the broader context of postgenocide Rwanda. I understood the executions as a political act

designed to demonstrate that the RPF was squarely in charge of things but came to realize that I only

superficially understood Rwandan politics. This lack of understanding was potentially dangerous for

the people I interviewed and for me. A few weeks later, Kofi Annan, then UN secretary general,

visited and held a town hall meeting with UN staff. We were invited to ask questions. I raised my hand

and asked, “What do we tell local people when they tell us human rights don’t matter?” Annan did not

answer my question, and I was later called into the office of my team leader, who told me that my

question was inappropriate given the prevailing political climate. I assumed he meant the political

dynamic within Rwanda at large but later learned that he meant between the UN mission and the RPF-

led government. The government shut down our Mission less than a month after Annan’s visit in July

1998.

Since I had submitted my resignation letter to the UN some four weeks prior to Annan’s visit, my