Cornelius Uvimana is a professor living in Rwanda during the 1990's. From Djibouti, he mourns the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, vowing to make a stage production that helps to explain those events. Meanwhile, he learns more and more about the genocide, searching for his own family in the aftermath. He is of Tutsi descent and his family has been ravaged by the horrors ethnic cleansing.
We meet a non-fiction writer, a politician man named Diop (the author) who also has an interest in writing about genocide, but from a non-fiction point of view. He ends up researching the specific facts of the real event, while the reader learns alongside him. His writing explores the tension between ethnic tribes in Rwanda. The two authors each try and capture the horror in their own genre.
Meanwhile, Cornelius's own research unveils a horrible reality. His own father betrayed their town, Murambi, inciting the violence there. His actions started murders that eventually totaled 60,000 victims, including Cornelius's mother and siblings. The father was responsible for those deaths. He reels, trying to understand the betrayal, unable to understand his father's hatred.
