Philip Gourevitch began visiting Rwanda in May of 1995 as a reporter on assignment for The New Yorker. It was just one year after the genocide, in which the Rwandan government had called on everyone in the country's Hutu majority group (85% of the population) to join together and murder everyone in the Tutsi minority group (15%). Though the massacres were low-tech--done largely by machete--they were carried out at dazzling speed, and 800,000 people were killed in just a hundred days. Gourevitch felt compelled to understand how this extraordinary crime had come to pass, how it was organized, how the great Western powers had stood by and watched it happen, and--most of all--how Rwandans were living with its legacy. Over the next two and a half years, Gourevitch returned to central Africa for six different reporting trips, spending a total of nine months in Rwanda and in its neighbor, the Congo (formerly Zaire). In 1998, his book, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

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