Murambi, the book of bones: the oral tradition in the service of a national history

Murambi, le livre des ossements by the Senegalese author Boubacar Boris Diop is a critical personal testimony of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The author reconstructs the genocide by bringing together the different voices of the people affected by it, as a way of recreating history and combating the Evil that exists in the world as the ultimate consequence of the struggle for power in the name of identity. This process of recovery leads the writer to the realization that, in the search for African identity, African languages and the mechanisms of orality as a search for the identity of African people. The ultimate goal, Boris Diop argues for the need for a national history created by Africans for Africans, and feed the creation of a literature designed Africans in their native languages. In opposition to this stand the transition literatures, written in the languages of the colonizer.