Plough, the publishing house of the Bruderhof Community, which organises the publication of books sympathetic to the evangelical Christian ethos of the Community, has recently brought out From Red Earth: A Rwandan Story of Healing and Forgiveness by Denise Uwimana. It is a heartrending autobiographical account by a Tutsi survivor of the 3-month killing rampage in the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi tribe by the Hutu tribe in Rwanda.

But it is also much more than this. Uwimana is a Christian and the constant and underlying theme of her book is how to reconcile palpable evil with the God of love and how to forgive those who do unimaginable evil to us or our loved ones. She herself was one of the more fortunate survivors: although her husband was killed – she was never able to discover when, where or how this happened - she was not raped (and thus infected with AIDS like thousands of other Tutsi women) nor were her three small sons slaughtered - although the machete-wielding Hutus made no distinction between men, women, children and even babies.