The Tears of a Man Flow Inward: Growing Up in the Civil War in Burundi By: Pacifique Irankunda

Author: Pacifique Irankunda

A prize-winning young author tells the moving story of growing up during Burundi’s civil war in a powerful memoir hailed as “a jewel of a book” (Margaret MacMillan)

When I felt tears streaming down, I wiped my eyes and repeated to myself what I heard the adults say, that the tears of a man flow inward.

As a little boy, Pacifique Irankunda lived through the thirteen-year civil war in Burundi, the war that upended his home and family and destroyed Burundi’s beautiful culture and traditions. He hid and watched as military units destroyed his village. Paci’s extraordinary and wise mother, one of the inspiring beacons of light in this book, led her children and others in ingenious acts of survival and kindness, through her unique ability to bring out the good in people, generosity towards even the soldiers who threatened them, and in her role as a Mushingantahe, an honorary title for a chosen leader in the village. Paci and his brother slept in the woods on nights when they heard shooting and violence. From his own memories and those of his family, he tells this story of surviving the vicious conflict between ethnic divisions in a country that once had a rich and beautiful culture of belief and traditions that was lost in the aftermath of the country’s destructive history of colonialism.

Written in lyrical prose, The Tears of a Man Flow Inward gives us a rare window into what it means to come of age in dark times, and how light can be found even in the midst of violence.

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