Photo: Ousmane Sembene's Moolaadé
In We regret to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, Philip Gourevitch's luminous document of the genocide the left nearly one million people dead in Rwanda in the early '90s, the New Yorker writer traced the dissent between Tutsi and Hutu people in the country to a specious Hamitic myth perpetuated by the first white colonists that came to the region. The discord between the two tribes continues to run deep, and in his book Gourevitch wonders how a nation can go about eradicating something so ingrained into the public consciousness. In Ousmane Sembene's Moolaadé, the conflict is not between different tribes of people but between men and women, and the issue is not genocide but female circumcision, a mandate of mutilation some continue to believe is required by Islam. In the film, the struggle of a Senegalese people to negotiate a modern role in the global market some 40 years after France's exit without completely losing sight of their identity as Africans is felt in a woman's struggle to protect a group of girls from being circumcised. Ed Gonzalez
In We regret to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, Philip Gourevitch's luminous document of the genocide the left nearly one million people dead in Rwanda in the early '90s, the New Yorker writer traced the dissent between Tutsi and Hutu people in the country to a specious Hamitic myth perpetuated by the first white colonists that came to the region. The discord between the two tribes continues to run deep, and in his book Gourevitch wonders how a nation can go about eradicating something so ingrained into the public consciousness. In Ousmane Sembene's Moolaadé, the conflict is not between different tribes of people but between men and women, and the issue is not genocide but female circumcision, a mandate of mutilation some continue to believe is required by Islam. In the film, the struggle of a Senegalese people to negotiate a modern role in the global market some 40 years after France's exit without completely losing sight of their identity as Africans is felt in a woman's struggle to protect a group of girls from being circumcised. Ed Gonzalez
