One

Before I had written a single word of this story, a publishing editor came to ask about my plans for it, then frowned and said: “Writing a romance novel — do you really have to set it in Africa? I don’t particularly want to watch Black people with little braids falling in love.”

She then asked about the subject matter and exclaimed: “Good lord, this topic is far too sensitive. You’re going to get yourself in trouble.”

As the story was being serialized, many readers guessed that Ka Long was based on Rwanda. The reasons for not simply writing Rwanda directly were twofold:

First, this is just a novel, and I had no desire to engage in a rigorous exploration of political issues. Rwanda is a real event, and the novel contains fictionalized elements, so I didn’t want to draw a direct equivalence.

Second, the real Rwanda was far more tragic than anything described in the novel. I didn’t have the heart to write it as it actually was.

But I had always intended, when the full story concluded, to have a conversation about Rwanda.

Two

What follows is a mix of materials I had on hand and things accumulated over time. Some details may not be entirely precise, and I haven’t attempted to describe the full complexity of the situation at the time — so this is offered only as a general introduction. Those with a deeper interest are encouraged to seek out more accurate sources.

Rwanda is a small country in central Africa, home primarily to two ethnic groups: the Hutu and the Tutsi.

The Rwandan Genocide took place in April 1994. The killings lasted from April through July — three months — with the death toll generally estimated at between 800,000 and one million people. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described it as “the darkest chapter in human history.”

This is a figure that shocks the conscience, because the twentieth century had already produced one humanitarian catastrophe that stunned the entire world: the Nazi extermination of Jewish people.

The Rwandan Genocide is widely considered to have been even worse and more appalling than that, for two main reasons:

First, the Nazi persecution of Jewish people, though it claimed many lives, accumulated those deaths over several years. The Rwandan massacre concentrated its killing into three months — the rate of killing was several times faster than the Nazis.

Second, the Nazis at least knew what they were doing was shameful. They cynically constructed concentration camps, publicly claimed they were factories, and lured Jewish people inside under the pretense of offering work. Rwanda was completely open about it — the radio was openly inciting: Come, kill.

The profound hatred between the two ethnic groups traces back to the carving up of Africa by Western colonial powers.

Rwanda originally had no ethnic divisions — only farmers, herders, and the like. One theory, widely circulated, holds that when the colonizers arrived, they manufactured ethnic categories as a way of redirecting social tensions.

The criteria for classification were absurdly arbitrary, drawing on factors such as skin tone, height, whether one’s nose resembled a European nose, and household wealth: ten cattle was the dividing line. Those with ten or more cattle were classified as Tutsi; those with fewer were classified as Hutu.

Think about it: our two families are neighbors. I’m a little taller than you; you’ve gotten a bit more sun-darkened than me. Both of us used to have nine cattle. Then by chance, one of my cows gives birth today. The colonizer counts the numbers and delivers his verdict: from this day forward, I am Tutsi and you are Hutu.

And more than that — ethnic identity had to be recorded on identification cards. When the classification was complete, Tutsi made up roughly 14 percent of the population, while Hutu made up approximately 85 percent.

The colonizers then gleefully rubbed their hands together and proceeded to introduce a series of policies that, across every dimension — political, economic, educational, administrative — blatantly favored the Tutsi, energetically promoting Tutsi advancement into positions of power while simultaneously propagating the idea that “the Tutsi are a more noble race, their culture is superior, they are descendants of the Hamites.”

Noble in what sense? They had only just been invented as a category. And as for the Hamites — I haven’t researched that either.

What happened was that once the Tutsi became the beneficiaries of this system, they grew arrogant. They genuinely began to believe they were superior, and they engaged in no small amount of oppression of the Hutu. The Hutu’s resentment naturally came to be directed squarely at them — who do you think you are?

At that point, even anti-colonialism had perhaps become secondary. Two groups of people, divided over a fabricated ethnic distinction — one that was sometimes indistinguishable without checking identity cards — had launched into a confrontational and prolonged struggle.

Meanwhile, history continued to move forward. In the 1950s and 1960s, national liberation movements swept the world, and African nations declared independence one after another. Given the tide of world events, the colonial powers went along with it, gradually transferring control of their colonies back to local hands.

At this juncture, Rwanda’s colonizers — the Belgians — made a blunt and heavy-handed decision based on various calculations (the Hutu were, after all, far more numerous): when handing over power, they handed it to the Hutu.

Trouble was obviously going to follow. The Tutsi had spent years at the top of the social hierarchy; suddenly, the Hutu were the rulers. And the Hutu had been sitting on decades of accumulated grievances, just waiting for somewhere to direct them.

So from the day Rwanda gained independence in 1962, there was never truly a period of peace internally. The Tutsi were continuously driven into exile, and continuously persecuted — the pattern of large-scale violence every few years, with smaller incidents in between, became routine. By the 1990s, Tutsi exiles abroad had formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front and were fighting the government army directly.

The United Nations, finding this situation untenable, stepped in to mediate in 1994. Rwanda’s president at the time — his name is too difficult to pronounce, so let’s just call him President Ha — was under enormous domestic and international pressure and boarded a plane to negotiate abroad.

This infuriated Hutu extremists. They began agitating among the population: Have you forgotten the days when the Tutsi held us under their boot? If negotiations succeed and the Tutsi gain power again, do you think your lives will be worth anything?

A plan to exterminate the Tutsi had also been quietly underway. In brief, the preparations included:

First, a code word had been agreed upon: “cut the tall trees” — a reference to the Tutsi, who tended to be slightly taller. Extremists secretly distributed word: whenever this phrase began spreading widely, that would be the signal to begin.

Second, the addresses of Tutsi households had been compiled. They had effectively mapped the home addresses of virtually every Tutsi — when the killings began, people went door to door by address and killed on the spot, with almost no one able to escape.

Third, large quantities of weapons had been purchased. It is said that between 1993 and 1994, half a million machetes were imported alone — presumably there wasn’t enough money for guns and ammunition. There is a footnote here: a significant number of those machetes were made in China. Reportedly, the Chinese manufacturers were themselves puzzled by the scale of the order and asked why the quantity was so large. The buyers calmly replied that the rubber harvest that year was particularly abundant and they needed to cut rubber.

So many mouths, so many people involved — this was hardly a well-kept secret. Many people had heard about it, but no one took it seriously. The commander of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Rwanda at the time was a Canadian named Dallaire, who knew even the location of the warehouses where the Hutu were stockpiling machetes. When he reported this to headquarters, New York’s response was: seizing weapons fell outside the scope of the UN’s authorized mandate. Not permitted.

On April 6th, President Ha’s plane, returning from negotiations abroad, was struck by two missiles just as it was about to land. Everyone on board perished. As a side note, also on that plane was the newly appointed president of Burundi — traveling as a passenger.

The massacres began within minutes. Radio stations operated by Hutu extremists began frenzied broadcasts: “Our president has been killed — by those Tutsis! Come, take up your weapons, avenge the president — cut down the tall trees, let us kill the cockroaches!”

Overnight, the entire Rwandan capital of Kigali was engulfed in a bloodbath.

What is even more striking is that the first people killed were not the Tutsi, but moderate Hutu figures — including senior officials such as the president of the constitutional court and government ministers. This sent a chilling message: even if you were Hutu, even if you held high office, you would be killed if you took the Tutsi side.

The Western nations at the time, along with the UN peacekeeping forces, had never encountered anything so brutally straightforward, and were caught completely off guard. The peacekeeping forces could not act unilaterally — any intervention required authorization from headquarters — and so headquarters began convening meetings to discuss.

While those discussions were in full swing, the killing had already reached a fever pitch. The Hutu had clearly planned ahead: right from the start, they killed ten Belgian peacekeepers, and the Belgian forces were the most capable of all the peacekeeping contingents then present in Rwanda.

The Belgians hadn’t anticipated that it would come to actual violence. Ten young men were dead, and there was no way to answer for this to taxpayers back home. The domestic outcry was enormous. The Belgian government weighed the situation and decided to evacuate its citizens and withdraw its troops.

Other nations looked on: if the strongest contingent is pulling out, what chance do the rest of us have staying? Things are clearly spiraling out of control here — better leave.

One by one, they all began to withdraw.

During the evacuation, the cars could carry pets, but not a single Tutsi person. Hutu militants had set up checkpoint after checkpoint along the roads, checking identity cards in every vehicle. When a Tutsi was found, they were dragged out and killed on the spot — with such brazenness that killings took place openly in front of UN soldiers.

During this period, many devastating things occurred. For example, when the Belgian forces withdrew, it was at night — they had said they would slip away quietly under cover of darkness. At the time, more than 2,000 refugees were under their protection. The refugees surrounded the vehicles and pleaded: “If you won’t take us, at least shoot us. A bullet is faster — we don’t want to be cut down with machetes.”

Of course, they couldn’t fire.

As the withdrawal began, crowds of refugees ran alongside the vehicles, crying out: “Please don’t leave us behind!”

Within hours, nearly all 2,000 refugees had been killed.

According to the records, the only international organizations that resolved to stay and continue working were the International Committee of the Red Cross in a small team, and the ill-fated Dallaire leading his UN peacekeeping forces.

Even the foreign doctors of Médecins Sans Frontières joined the evacuation. One doctor told reporters: “We concluded that it was no longer meaningful to remain and work here. Treating someone who is about to be killed is futile.”

The UN meeting was still going. Meetings, deliberations, more meetings. Tutsi who were still alive sought help through every possible channel, reaching out to friends abroad.

Reportedly, an American official called the Hutu military commander at the time and warned him: “If you don’t stop, the United States will intervene.”

At the time, the entire American public was consumed by one major celebrity news story: the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Rwanda was barely receiving any attention at all.

The commander replied: “Rwanda has no oil and no gold. Would America really come? And what would you come for?”

He had read the American way of operating with remarkable precision.

Others appealed to the Americans to take a different approach: even without sending troops, the US had the technology to jam Rwanda’s local radio stations. The broadcasts were so incendiary, and so terrifyingly effective — when they suddenly identified the location of a group of Tutsi in hiding, they would immediately announce it over the airwaves: “Come quickly! At the intersection of such-and-such street, there’s a large group of cockroaches!”

Every Hutu who heard the news jumped onto trucks, swinging their machetes, and converged on the spot. Along the way, more people who couldn’t get on trucks would run there instead — to say nothing of those who were already in the area.

But the Americans refused the request to jam the broadcasts. Their stated reason: they couldn’t interfere with freedom of the press. A later account revealed the truth: jamming shortwave signals cost $8,500 per hour, and the Americans probably didn’t want to pay.

And so, with the BBC able to photograph and broadcast what was happening, and the world understanding perfectly well what was taking place, the killings continued for three months.

There is too much detail to recount. I’ll stop here.

Three

There is a book called The Lucifer Effect, which examines how good people become capable of great evil — or, put another way, how far an ordinary person truly is from committing murder.

Its conclusion: under certain social conditions, even good people can commit atrocities. This transformation of character is called “the Lucifer effect” — Lucifer, God’s most beloved angel, who fell from grace and became the first fallen angel, cast out of Heaven.

The Rwandan Genocide produced many understandings of human nature that shatter all prior assumptions.

For instance: doctors are supposed to save lives, yet many doctors emerged as “distinguished killers.” Human rights organizations documented that across specialties — whether male or female doctors, whether internists, surgeons, pediatricians, or obstetricians — doctors participated in killing their Tutsi colleagues, patients, and the injured and displaced who had come to the hospital seeking refuge.

Similarly: teachers denounced their students, and in some cases killed them with their own hands. One Hutu teacher told a reporter: “I myself killed some children… Our first grade once had eighty children. In the end, only twenty-five remained.”

One farmer, speaking to interviewers, said: “I killed because I had no choice. If I didn’t kill them, I myself would be killed. Many people died precisely because they refused to kill…”

After the massacres ended, many Hutu perpetrators refused to acknowledge what they had done, insisting that they had been possessed by demons at the time: “It wasn’t me. It was the demon inside me that did it.”

They could not face what they themselves had done.

Four

My initial impulse for this story came from the person mentioned earlier — the Canadian general, Dallaire, who was serving as the commander of the UN peacekeeping force at the time.

The trigger was watching a documentary about Rwanda in which this general was mentioned. He had sunk into profound guilt and self-reproach, had attempted suicide several times, and to this day must rely on medication to sleep and maintain emotional stability.

I found this impossible to understand. This wasn’t some young man — this was a general, a seasoned soldier who had seen much of the world and had undoubtedly witnessed no small amount of cruelty. And it wasn’t as if he had killed anyone. How could a person attempt suicide “several times”?

Some passionately outraged keyboard critics would probably have called him naive or overly sentimental.

So I looked into his role in this event.

First: Dallaire had been appointed commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) and had requested 4,500 troops. The UN gave him a force of just over 2,500, poorly trained and equipped, with inadequate logistics and almost no operational budget. He later recalled: “We needed to order flashlights. After a long delay waiting for them to arrive, the flashlights finally came — with no batteries included.”

Second: He had no intelligence-gathering capacity. Though he had made the request to headquarters, the response was that intelligence gathering was not in keeping with peacekeeping policy.

Third: Despite all of this, he worked hard. In January 1994, an officer on the Hutu side was preparing to defect and revealed portions of the extremists’ plan to Dallaire’s team.

Consider what that informant disclosed:

The Hutu had trained 1,700 people. Divided into groups of forty, each group was “capable of killing 1,000 Tutsi within twenty minutes,” and they had already been dispersed throughout the capital, Kigali. When the signal of “cut the tall trees” was given, these people would spearhead the action. In other words, the Hutu had trained instigators — because ordinary people are easily led and susceptible to incitement. Simply hearing a radio broadcast might not be enough to move anyone to act. But what if people had already seen others taking the lead?

The Hutu had a plan to kill Belgian peacekeepers. This would compel Belgium to withdraw from UNAMIR — and the Belgian forces were UNAMIR’s most significant element.

The informant knew the locations where the weapons were stockpiled and was willing to provide those locations and more intelligence. His condition: “The United Nations helps me and my family leave the country safely and provides protection.”

Note: this was January 1994 — at least three months before the actual killings began.

Dallaire was overjoyed and immediately sent a report to the United Nations, requesting that the weapons be seized first. The response, as everyone now knows: the UN replied that this exceeded the authorized mandate. Not permitted.

Dallaire made several more attempts, repeatedly pushing for authorization — all of which were refused. His UNAMIR forces were scattered across Kigali, cut off from each other by roadblocks. After the ten Belgian peacekeepers were killed, he was especially worried about the safety of his remaining soldiers. Food supplies would last less than two weeks; some camps had only enough water for two days; fuel, ammunition, and medicine were all running low.

But Dallaire still refused to leave. He believed that with reinforcements, he could stop the killings. He received orders from UN officials on three separate occasions directing him to prepare an evacuation plan; he refused to carry out those orders each time. One of those occasions was a direct call from Boutros-Ghali, the UN Secretary-General at the time.

After Belgium’s withdrawal, Dallaire was close to despair — UNAMIR’s strength had been drastically reduced. Yet he held on, continuing to shelter approximately 30,000 civilians in his camps. But then something even more devastating happened: just over ten days after the Belgian forces departed, the Security Council passed a new resolution calling for the withdrawal of most UN peacekeeping personnel, leaving behind only a symbolic force of 270.

From over 2,500 troops, to losing the Belgians, to only 270 remaining — and those 270 were scattered in all directions, with insufficient logistics, dwindling food and water, and almost no ammunition. He couldn’t engage in a direct fight; ten soldiers had already been killed, and as their commander, he was responsible for their safety.

So, should Dallaire be held responsible for what happened? I don’t think so — I believe he had done everything he could. And yet, when it was all over, he was the one who had attempted suicide several times and still, to this day, requires medication to sleep and to maintain emotional stability.

After thinking it over at length, I imagine it must be because the killings happened right before his eyes, every day, relentlessly — the direct sensory horror of it exceeded what he could endure.

I don’t wish to criticize the politicians who convened meetings and passed resolutions for being too cold — they had their own considerations. I think that if those same people had been dragged to the scene, forced to witness with their own eyes what was happening, they would have screamed, wept, and done everything in their power to stop it. But when they were thousands of miles away, sitting in air-conditioned rooms, drinking coffee, and holding meetings, they could calculate costs, assess whether it served their national interests, weigh whether it was worth the investment, debate how to spend less.

Among those 1,700 trained killers mentioned earlier, some had been trained by foreign military officers. A French officer who witnessed the horrors of the killings wept uncontrollably, unable to believe “that soldiers he had personally trained could have committed such monstrous acts.”

Because of Dallaire, I went on to research further related materials and came across a woman named Vautrin — likely familiar to Chinese readers. During the Nanjing Massacre, she had devoted herself to protecting Chinese refugees. But what few people know is the aftermath: after returning home, overcome by despair at human nature and profound psychological depression, she died by suicide using gas.

Those who committed countless atrocities with their own hands often continued to speak without shame, refusing to acknowledge their guilt; while these decent, compassionate people lost their lives and their capacity to live normally one after another. I find that profoundly unjust.

Five

And so I wanted to write a story about a protected zone — but I didn’t want to write it in the usual way, singing praises and celebrating, describing how people fought on bravely and outwitted their enemies.

I found myself thinking: what if there were a young woman who, when she was in the protected zone, was still very young, and under enormous pressure made a mistake she could never put behind her? After everything ended, would she still have the courage to go on? Would she try to make amends? And how would she do that?

That is how this story came to exist: The Events of April.

In truth, I gave the female protagonist a significant advantage. Many of her predecessors — people older, more seasoned, more unblemished than her, people like Dallaire and Vautrin — couldn’t cross that threshold. They chose death as a way to end all the pain. How, then, does she cross it?

Sometimes in writing fiction, the instinct is to lean on easy convention: place one character under the weight of profound suffering, have them encounter their true love, and achieve redemption.

But in truth, life is far more complicated than fiction. Not every redemption can be solved with love. The armor is always there. Sometimes you have to put it on yourself.

Just as the Rwandan crisis ultimately turned not because the international community stepped in decisively, but because the Tutsi’s Rwandan Patriotic Front fought back. The Hutu grew fearful of retaliation and began fleeing to neighboring countries in large numbers — “dropping piles and piles of machetes, daggers, and spears at the roadside before crossing the border.”

Even if Cen Jin had never met Wei Lai, she would have eventually brought the truth to light, ensured that those deserving of retribution received it.

Wei Lai’s presence simply made the ending better.

Ka Long is Rwanda with much of the despair softened — the death toll reduced to roughly 200,000; many international organizations and volunteers stayed to protect refugees and establish protected zones; and after the war, the divine hand demanded accountability for war criminals, with even state-level support possible…

In the real Rwanda, as noted earlier, large numbers of war criminals fled abroad. The government estimated it would take 200 years to seek justice for the victims; many key perpetrators found shelter in other countries, particularly France. Even at the twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide in 2014 — when UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon traveled in person to pay his respects — Rwanda explicitly refused to allow the French president to attend and reportedly threatened to sever diplomatic ties.

This is reflected in the story: the case of Re Lei Mi takes place in France, and after the divine hand claimed responsibility for Re Lei Mi’s killing, the French police dropped the investigation.

Two months to write a story that takes place over one month.

From the start, I never planned for it to be too long, and I didn’t want it to go too deep. The details laid bare — so much suffering — and writing too much of it begins to feel like exploiting that suffering for effect. Human nature and compassion are subjects far too vast. I don’t feel capable of doing them justice, so I simply borrowed a broad backdrop while keeping the focus on the story itself.

Six

Writing this story, I was struck by how good it is to live in peace. The investor Warren Buffett has a theory he calls the “ovarian lottery” — being born at the right time in a good place is like winning the ovarian lottery.

Thinking about living in a civilized, peaceful country — that really is a stroke of great fortune. A girl in a remote part of Africa subjected to female genital mutilation, her body mutilated at three or four years old — what capacity does she have to shape her own destiny? Sold by her father at the age of twelve or thirteen in exchange for camels, married off to a man of fifty or sixty — while someone elsewhere weeps over love, she doesn’t even know what love is.

In the Rwandan Genocide, the Western nations’ decision to evacuate their citizens and withdraw their troops first drew widespread criticism. But looking at it from another angle: when nationals abroad find themselves in chaos, having a strong government move swiftly to protect them is also a form of good fortune.

Thank you for reading. If you didn’t enjoy it, that is entirely your right. If you did, then we share a connection.

Until next time. Wishing you peace.

Notes:

For a detailed account of that period of history, the book Africa’s Fifty Years: A History of Independence by British author Martin Meredith contains a chapter titled “The Graves Are Not Yet Full,” which covers the Rwandan Genocide in considerable depth.

There is a domestically produced documentary of approximately forty minutes called Rwanda’s 100 Days. Interested readers may search for it — I found it traced events clearly from beginning to end.

Several films address that period of history. The most well-known is Hotel Rwanda. *Two others: * Shooting Dogs (which tells the story of a small school where, after Belgium’s withdrawal, two foreigners protect refugees), and Sometimes in April (which follows an ordinary Rwandan looking back and rebuilding life after the massacre). My personal view is that they are worth watching, though they have their limitations.