USC to tackle Rwandan genocide

The University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education announced it will start recording Rwandan survivor testimony in the coming months.

Next month, the institute’s executive director, Douglas Greenberg, will travel to Rwanda to begin organizing a project with IBUKA, the umbrella organization for all of the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide survivor groups. Greenberg and IBUKA plan to interview Rwandan survivors about their experiences during the genocide.

Greenberg said these visual testimonies will be available on the institute’s online archive, the largest of its kind in the world, to educate people about the harmful effects of prejudice.

As someone who’s preparing to pursue a PhD in genocide studies (with a particular interest in Africa) I have to applaud USC’s efforts. It’s impossible to do a comparative analysis of genocides without intensive primary source material, and in many cases modern genocides don’t come with the kind of methodical documentation used by the Nazis, putting the onus on survivor and witness testimony.