Cut down all the fall trees.

“Cut down all the fall trees.” is the phrase Joe recalls from radio broadcasts during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Set beside an explicit instruction that Hutus kill Tutsi spouses, the imperative turns an image of clearing fallen trees into a chilling echo of the killing it accompanies.

The Phrase in Context

While driving Harry Hole through Rwanda, Joe recounts that 800,000 people were killed within a few weeks in 1994. He describes Hutus slaughtering Tutsi neighbors with machetes and recalls a radio message that called it a Hutu’s duty to kill a Tutsi husband. The phrase followed that instruction, so its violent implication emerges from its placement rather than from any explanation of the words themselves.

Image and Implication

The sentence is brief and imperative: “Cut down all the fall trees.” Its rural image is sharply at odds with the human violence Joe has just described. In this account, the line functions as a metaphorical or coded extension of the broadcast’s direct incitement; the passage does not explain its intended meaning more specifically.

The Road as Witness

Joe connects the broadcast and the killings to the road they are travelling. Many people fled along it, he says, and bodies once lay piled across it so densely that some stretches could not be passed. The phrase therefore enters a recollection grounded in a specific landscape: its apparent simplicity stands against the mass death that the road still recalls.