Without Past No Future. Forgetting Remembering and Reconciliation in Gilbert Gatore's Le Passé devant soi

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature Works grade: 1.3 University of Tubingen (English Department) course: Visions of the Future Shadows of the Past: Contemporary Issues in African Literature language: English abstract: 20 years ago in 1994 the otherwise largely ignored little Central African country of Rwanda made the international headlines by making the world witness its most recent genocide to date. The countries two major ethnic groups Hutu and Tutsi had a long history of violence with recurring mutual massacres. Following the downing of the plane carrying Rwanda's president Habyarimana Hutu militias took control and together with the ordinary population tried to wipe out the Tutsi in countrywide government-sponsored massacres that exceeded previous massacres in quantity and quality.Post-genocide Rwandan society and therefore its government faces a very precarious situation: how to rebuild a society in which there are more perpetrators than victims and in which the crimes where largely conducted by the ordinary population? Perhaps the biggest problem faced is that at their core the massacres were hate crimes as opposed to massacres for practical reasons say to get more land. One of the country's most pressing issues is therefore reconciliation between these two groups over the past conflicts.The Tutsi-led government has decided to tackle this complex problem by simple means: officially abolishing ethnicities and encouraging Tutsi survivors to forgive Hutu perpetrators. However as noble and well-meaning this approach seems at first glance the negative implications might far outweigh the positive ones in the long run which will be discussed in detail further below. Many non-fictional papers have dealt with the phenomenon of collective amnesia yet a surprisingly small number of fictional works has done so making the few existing ones the more valuable. This paper is going to use