Forgotten race at heart of Rwanda novel

A third of them died in the genocide but they are the forgotten race of Rwanda. Now, for once, the Twa people — or Batwa — are centre stage, in the novel Broken heart of Africa.

By English writer J. R. Sparrow, the book follows the pursuit of a Hutu mastermind of the Rwandan slaughter. A former British soldier and a young Yugoslav woman — a refugee TV reporter — are hunting the Hutu for personal reasons and track him from Africa to Europe and back again.

From the Belgian chateau of an aristocratic arms dealer who, they suspect, plans to arm a Hutu campaign to retake Rwanda, the trail leads to the killing fields of north-eastern Zaire, in today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo. No one can venture there without the help of an army but the former soldier turns to friends among the Twa. A small band of them lead him through the rain forest cloaking the Virunga volcanoes.

The Twa people are the region’s original inhabitants, a maltreated and marginalised pygmy minority, condemned to lives of poverty and discrimination not only in Rwanda, where they are less than one percent of the population, but in neighbouring Uganda and the Congo as well.

When the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide was remembered in 2014, it was the dominant groups — the Tutsis and the Hutus — who were placed in the spotlight again. There was little or no attention for the Twa despite their suffering in a madness that was not of their making.

Even the peace process has not helped the Twa. The Rwandan government has in effect outlawed ethnicity in its efforts to establish a national identity. Where once there were Tutsi, Hutu and Twa, the authorities insist, there are now only Rwandans. The cause may be just but without a distinct identity the Twa’s distinct needs are overlooked.

The fact-based context of the story reflects the Twa’s predicament and also delves into the causes of atrocity far greater than that of the genocide itself. The related Congolese conflict has never ceased and even today rebel Tutsis, Hutus and others continue to terrorise the population.

Broken heart of Africa is the tale of an epic journey for which the author has drawn on his personal experience of Rwanda and the former Zaire before, during and after the genocide. But its universal themes of intolerance and displacement were never more relevant than today.

‘Broken heart of Africa. A hunt for justice in the land of the Twa’ by J. R. Sparrow is available from Amazon.