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The year 1994 was, as in the words immortalised by Charles Dickens, "the best of times, and it was the worst of times".

Ten years ago, South Africans were ululating in the streets as Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the country's first democratically elected President. The world watched, and smiled. But in another place, the world also looked on - as neighbour turned against neighbour, husband slaughtered wife, and swollen rivers hushed the screams of thousands of dead. The country's name will be forever soaked in blood: Rwanda. Writer and poet Veronique Tadjo went to Rwanda when everyone else's eyes were on "the good news" of South Africa because, in her words, she wanted to make sense of the numbing images on her TV screen; of black bodies piled like haystacks; of one particular blurred, out-of-focus image that disturbed her for months afterwards - of a man laying into the head of another with a machete.

What she wanted to answer was a question that has burned in the minds of many writers, from Primo Levi to Antjie Krog: What turns ordinary people into killers?

In the Shadow of Imana is a deeply personalised account of the otherwise ordinary lives of the people affected by the Rwandan genocide. Though hundreds of accounts have been penned on the subject, few strike such a deeply personal nerve. The book is less a clinical, factual account than it is a voice for the men and women who survived the genocide, who fled it, who wrote of it and - significantly - who took part in it.

In her preface, Tadjo writes: "Occasionally someone will reveal a secret to you that you have not asked to know. Then you are crushed under a burden of knowledge too heavy to bear. I could no longer keep Rwanda buried inside me. I needed to lance the abscess..."

Tadjo, who's from the Ivory Coast, has lived in South Africa for the past two years - or rather, she has been "observing" the invisible threads between the pasts of this country and Rwanda. She has not been scanning the skies for the signs of genocide, but trying to make sense of what she believes to be far more than mere assumption - "if it could happen there, it could happen again, anywhere else, maybe even here. It was not just one nation lost in the dark heart of Africa that was affected."

This week Tadjo will participate in the publishing forum at the Time of the Writer Festival in Durban, an annual gathering of some of Africa's top literary minds. The aim of the forum is to examine what 10 years of democracy have meant to publishing and writing in South Africa. It is inevitable that Tadjo will be asked, as she has been in recent radio and newspaper interviews, about the "lessons" South Africa can learn from the Rwandan experience.

Tadjo writes that she had to "go beyond the facts and figures and quick images" of Rwanda to realise that behind every issue, there is a person. "These were people, they had their lives, their loves, their dreams and disappointments. My job is to recreate those lives - to resurrect the dead." Her book cautions against the assumption that a hatred fomented by, and based on, ethnicity or race will never resurface in South Africa. "There will be someone who will think they got away with it in the past, maybe they can get away with it again..."

More implicitly, though, Tadjo warns, we should never assume that our past is dead and buried simply because we, like Rwanda, have had "reconciliation".

When reggae maestro Peter Tosh sang, "Everyone's crying out for peace, none is crying out for justice", his lyrics prophesied a time when a previously unrepresentative government would be replaced by "the government of the people" - but also a time when addressing the hurts of the past would, in some minds, be sacrificed on the altar of reconciliation; of a superficial brotherhood.

In the Shadow of Imana is not only about giving voice to the horror of the genocide; it is also at pains to show how Rwandans have come to grips with their past, trying to rebuild shattered lives in the midst of former oppressors who are not all "the devil incarnate" but "ordinary people, human beings, like you and me".

One of Tadjo's characters laments: "... and we will never have all the answers to our questions. We must punish those who deserve to be punished, those who began the reign of cruelty. But the others must be freed of the burden of guilt."

In post-genocide Rwanda, Tadjo has seen the evils of collective guilt. "You must realise how difficult it must be for someone in the wrong camp [of the same ethnic group as the violators of the past] to be seen always as a suspect," says Tadjo. "It is very difficult to bear, especially for the young ones. It also prevents people from seeing each other as people."

But this does not mean that we should "put a lid on these things too quickly".

In the case of Rwanda, the voices in Imana talk of how important it was for their psychological rebirth not only that justice was done, but that "victims have to feel that justice has taken place".

Though she supports the reconciliation process, Tadjo is not sure whether South Africa has reached a point where victims of apartheid feel that justice has taken place. It is less about punishing those "guilty" than it is about acknowledgement. "It should be recognised [by white South Africans] that they benefited from apartheid, and that they feel bad about it," she argues. Failure to do so brings with it long-term consequences - of a lack of closure; of a state of affairs where people will forever, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez once noted, simmer in the maggot broth of memory. Writes Tadjo: "We should not close the door too quickly."

·  Tadjo, Helon Habila, Chenjerai Hove, Antjie Krog, Zakes Mda and Gcina Mhlophe will be among those taking part in the Time of The Writer Festival, Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre, Durban, March 22-27. For more information call the Centre for Creative Arts on (031) 260-2506.

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