The boy they left for dead.

Mugina is a hill in central Rwanda, in what was then the prefecture of Gitarama. Before April 1994, it was an ordinary place: banana leaves heavy with rain, cattle moving along red paths, children sent to fetch water before school, evenings loud with a family that never stopped talking over one another.

Révérien was fifteen. He had a mother and a father, brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents — a whole architecture of people. He knew whose laugh belonged to whom in the dark. He knew which neighbour would call his name across a field. That, too, mattered later: the killers were not strangers. They were faces from the market, from church, from the same hill.

On 7 April 1994, the killing began across Rwanda. Within days it reached the hills of Gitarama. Tutsi families fled upward, as they had in earlier persecutions, believing that a church or a hilltop might hold. This time nothing held.

The Genocide against the Tutsi was not chaos. It was organized: lists, roadblocks, radio broadcasts naming people and places, weapons distributed in advance, ordinary men told each morning where to go. Over roughly a hundred days, more than one million Tutsi were murdered — the fastest rate of killing of the twentieth century.

On 20 April 1994, they came for his family. In a single afternoon, forty-three of the people Révérien loved were killed with machetes and clubs: his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters, his uncles and aunts, his cousins, his grandparents. Not a distant statistic — a household, a lineage, a Sunday table.

They struck him too. Blades took his right eye, opened his face, cut his hand and his arm. He fell among his own dead and they left him there, certain he was finished. Night came. He opened the one eye he had left. He was alive, and everyone he belonged to was not.

What followed was years of surgery and pain — reconstructive operations, infections, a body relearning how to be a body. But the wound he speaks about most is not the visible one. It is the silence that arrives when there is no one left to remember your childhood with you: no mother to correct the story, no brother to finish the joke.

He was taken in and eventually found his way to Switzerland, where he learned French well enough to do the hardest thing a survivor can do — set it down in words. Writing meant returning to the hill on purpose, every day, alone.

His memoir, published in French as Génocidé (Presses de la Renaissance, later J'ai Lu) and in English as Genocide: My Stolen Rwanda, opens with the sentence that has followed him ever since: « Ils m'ont tué moi et toute ma famille sur une colline du Rwanda. Mais je ne suis pas mort. » — They killed me, and all my family, on a hill in Rwanda. But I did not die.

The book is not written for pity. It is written as evidence: names, dates, a hill, an afternoon. It refuses the comfortable abstractions — 'tribal violence', 'ancient hatreds' — and puts back what those words remove: forty-three specific people who were loved.

Since then Révérien has spoken at Kwibuka commemorations in Rwanda, in European institutions, at universities in Europe and Asia, in memorials, in classrooms of teenagers the age he was in April 1994. He speaks about warning signs — dehumanizing language, lists, propaganda, the slow permission a society gives itself before it kills.

And he speaks against denial, which he calls the final stage of the genocide: the attempt to murder the dead a second time by arguing them out of existence. Against that, he offers something denial cannot answer — a face, a scar, a name, and a witness still standing.