The Rwandan Genocide enters the narrative through Joe’s recollection to Harry Hole during a drive through Rwanda. Joe describes 800,000 people being killed within a matter of weeks in 1994, and recalls the road as both a route of flight and a landscape marked by the dead. The scene makes the scale of the violence concrete through the account of neighbors turning on neighbors and bodies obstructing the way.

Joe’s Account

As Joe drives a Land Rover along a paved road through green hillsides, he names the figure that frames his recollection: 800,000 people killed within weeks in 1994. The landscape they pass is not presented as remote from that history. Joe points out the road as one along which many people fled, connecting the present journey to the mass displacement he remembers.

Incitement and Neighbor Against Neighbor

Joe describes Hutus going to their own neighbors and killing them with machetes because they were Tutsis. He also recalls radio broadcasts urging Hutus to kill Tutsi spouses, presenting murder as a duty. The words “Cut down all the fall trees.” appear within this recollection, sharpening the account’s depiction of how the violence was voiced and encouraged.

The Road and Its Dead

In Joe’s memory, the road bore the physical aftermath of the killings: bodies lay everywhere, piled on top of one another, and in some places made passage impossible. His brief reference to vultures feeding on the dead reinforces the starkness of the scene without interrupting the forward motion of the drive. The contrast between the road’s current traffic and Joe’s account of its earlier obstruction makes the journey a passage through a landscape carrying the traces of mass death.