Confronting a genocide

On April 6, 1994, Dorcy Rugamba left his parents' home in Kigali to visit his aunt in the south of Rwanda. That evening, he was planning to drive back but his father persuaded him that he should return the next day.

The following morning, Hutu militia broke into his parents' house and killed everyone except his younger brother: the first day of a genocide that would last another 90 and in which an estimated 1million Rwandan Tutsis would be killed. 'When my brother called to tell me what had happened, I thought it was a vendetta just against my family,' says Rugamba, who fled within a week into Burundi. 'It was only later that I realised what was going on.'

Today, Rugamba, a theatre practitioner who has worked with Peter Brook, is looking surprisingly fresh-faced despite having just arrived on the Eurostar from Belgium. Although he has since built a new life in Brussels, he always knew that at some point he would have to deal with the psychological legacy of a genocide that not only took his family but which was perpetrated by an enemy that came from within. 'I knew the people who had killed my parents,' he says. 'They were neighbours; I used to go to school with them. I was scared. But I couldn't just put it to one side.'

He returned to Kigali in 1999 to co-author and perform in a play called Rwanda 94, a European-led initiative that wove together survivor testimonies with music, comedy and fictional reconstructions. 'It was six hours long but everyone stayed,' he says proudly.

The experience of that indirectly inspired his latest production with the Rwandan theatre company Urwintore, which he set up in 2001: a revival of Peter Weiss's searing 1965 docudrama The Investigation, which can lay claim to being among the first to employ verbatim techniques - it's based on the transcripts of the 1964 Frankfurt war crimes trials of German citizens for their role in running Auschwitz. It was performed in Rwanda in 2005.

It's undoubtedly provocative to use the Jewish Holocaust to tell the story of Rwanda: it's not just that it revisits a subject already widely explored in the arts over one that hasn't been but it might imply that the Rwandan genocide isn't worthy of a play in its own right. Rugamba is well aware of these concerns and defends the decision passionately. 'Plenty came to see Rwanda 94 in Butare and Kigali but there were plenty who didn't,' he says. 'Many thought the story was being told against them. They felt interrogated and accused. So I wanted to find a way to make them confront what was inside them through the safety net of someone else's story.'

Rugamba is emphatic that he is not trying to say both genocides were the same. But he does point out that, since The Investigation is based on a trial, it reflects the same process of asking questions that Rwanda is currently going through.

'I was particularly swayed by Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil" to describe how ordinary people got caught up in the Nazi regime, because the defendants in the Frankfurt trials were not important figures,' he says. 'They were mostly ordinary men following orders, Yet, in executing those orders, they used their own personal cruelty and that's significant. Some people mixed up the ideas of war and genocide, as if the acts that took place were acts of war. This is an argument we also find in Rwanda. Some who have admitted to crimes justify them by saying they considered they were at war and under attack. It is a way of denying the genocide by claiming it was war.'

Most people in Rwanda only had a superficial knowledge of the Jewish Holocaust before their own genocide occurred.For many, the discovery that a similar sort of thing had happened before was both an appalling shock and an odd form of consolation. 'There's a bit in the play where they talk about mutilating women and in Rwanda that line really hit women hard,' says Rugamba. 'They said: "That's not possible. We thought it had only happened here." It gave me the impression that it helped them to know that it had happened elsewhere.'

These days, it is illegal in Rwanda to denote someone as being Tutsi or Hutu and Rugamba has no idea of the individual ethnicity of his actors (each deliberately play both victims and perpetrators). 'By having Rwandan actors play Germans and Jews, it becomes impossible for anyone to watch it and say "that's not my story",' he says. 'Because it becomes everyone's story. It becomes universal.'