When Death Haunts the Fields: Football and Genocide in Rwanda

Abstract

Our article aims to analyze how football has been broadly affected by the Rwandan genocide, occurred between April and July 1994. Considered one of the main sports and leisure modalities in Rwanda for decades, football used to represent an environment of peaceful coexistence between Hutus and Tutsis. However, the ethnic conflict that culminated in the massacre of over 800,000 people along 100 days caused such picture of apparent harmony to collapse. Twenty years after the genocide, the country struggles with a permanent work of reconciliation between the two ethnic groups and the memory of the dead. In this aspect, we focus on this sad chapter of the Rwandan history, relying on the testimonies by former players who have survived the killings, as published in the chapter “The disappearance of the nets”, from Jean Hatzfeld’s book Machete Season (2006), originally entitled Une saison de machettes: Récits (2003), a work of testimonial character and great significance for literary studies.