Travels in Inhumanity

Africans, particularly women, rarely assume the travel writer's gaze. The traveller is generally assumed to be white, Western and male. In 1998, Ivorian author Véronique Tadjo travelled to Rwanda with a group of other African writers to reflect upon and write about the 1994 genocide. This article focuses on L'Ombre d'Imana: voyages jusqu'au bout du Rwanda (2000), the travel narrative she published as a result of this trip. It analyses the ways in which Tadjo positions herself and her reader as an ambiguous tourist in Rwanda and how, in doing so, she succeeds in challenging received ideas about the genocide.