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.
Please take a look at the work Voices of Rwanda (www.voicesofrwanda.org) has been doing in Rwanda for the last few years. They have been doing quality work filming testimonies in Rwanda that will be valuable academically and they take great pride in each interview they conduct, not to mention building a highly technical way of searching the interviews.
Perhaps you can post their site as a resource on your website as well and follow some of the work they are doing.
Thanks,
Joseph