Book description
Navigate the darkest corridors of humanity with Machete Season–a harrowing saga that dusts off the grim truths of the Rwandan Genocide.
Rewind to April-May 1994, as the Tutsis face the unimaginable horror of annihilation under their fellow Hutu's brutal reign. The author, Jean Hatzfeld, painstakingly pieces together the chilling accounts…
Why read it?
1 author picked Machete Season as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
It is one of the most emotionally challenging reads I have ever read. This book is a bone-chilling dissection of how teachers, peasants, and shopkeepers in apparently peaceful farmlands in Southern Rwanda went from sharing harvests and drinking with their neighbors to becoming their pitiless executioners. “Killing was less wearisome than farming,” one of the protagonists remembers during testimonies that I have wrestled with since first encountering them.
The book is the second installment in Hatzfeld’s trilogy on the Rwandan Genocide and relies almost entirely on interviews with the perpetrators in one community. I find it extraordinarily lucid in explaining…
From Harry's list on ideas that have been shaping modern Africa.
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