Foreword

In April 1994, there was a genocide in Rwanda. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed. These were functional people, people with back pain, farms, animals, businesses and children; regular people. They were Twas, Hutu moderates and mostly Tutsis, gruesomely murdered by Hutu extremists. In the last year I watched three films set during the 1994 Rwanda genocide, all 100 days of it. These films not only help visualise as much as I have gone ahead to read, but they also, with the capacity and skillfulness of fiction, carefully and intricately craft out storylines of possible lives of people and scenarios during the genocide.

The first film I saw was Alanna Brown’s Trees of Peace. Four women of different backgrounds, trapped and hiding during the genocide. Then I saw Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda, a 2004 biographical historical drama lionising the then manager, Paul Rusesabagina, of Hôtel des Mille Collines which housed over 1200 refugees during the genocide. Lastly, Raoul Peck’s Sometimes in April, another historical drama which sees a Hutu soldier trying to get his family to safety, and much more of the brutality of the genocide than the previous films.

I observed that I could cut scenes from all three films, and they would play seamlessly into one big storyline surrounding one big historical event. At the start of the genocide in April, Paul in Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda is able to get his wife and children to safety at the Hôtel des Mille Collines, which he runs. Annick’s husband in Alanna Brown’s Trees of Peace hides his wife, Jeanette, Mutesi and Peyton, a volunteer from the United States, who, if she had not hidden, would probably have been rescued by the UN as seen in Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda. And despite Honore’s Hutu extremist status in Raoul Peck’s Sometimes in April, he doesn’t successfully make it past the military roadblock while smuggling Augustin’s wife and children to Hôtel des Mille Collines like Paul in Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda.

In telling history through fictional viewpoints—as analysed in these audio-visual historical dramas (although Hotel Rwanda is biographical) —as well as the written works in this issue and Lọ́unlọ́un’s past issues—films like short stories are a great way to educate and inspire. They can amplify the ordinariness or extraordinariness of people and places before and after a historical event. Historical fiction not only helps remember what was, but also reconciles what is with what was. Why is this person, this place, these people, this economy, this street, like this? It is a doorway to enlightenment, and more intentionally, incomplete enlightenment; the best historical fiction are the ones that give only a glimpse, or enough of a glimpse to inspire the reader to research and form their own opinions and views because history is not merely black and white—especially with the possible power dynamics that can surround the dissemination of the very historical narratives these stories are based on. The writer is permitted to be biased; the characters are permitted to be in the wrong, enlightened or disillusioned. 

With pedagogy in Lọúnlọún’s short stories, what is hoped to be achieved is curiosity, a desire to research, to find out more, even with baseline knowledge. A desire to find out that a massacre similar to the 1994 Rwandan genocide had happened in Burundi prior, or that the Belgians had described as Tutsi, anyone with more than ten cows.

In this issue, we feature nine stories set in Zambia, Zimbabwe, the United Kingdom and Nigeria. We see how children, women, immigrants and objects interact with historical events, and how their lives are altered for good or not, by them. It was an honour working with brilliant writers and a team of talented editors and illustrator for this issue. There are much stories to tell, and history to retell.