Into Kigali: the Genocide Museum

4 January 2010

Rwanda entry: 3

Rwanda bears a painful history. Despite the efforts of those who attempt to forget, the past casts an unforgettable shadow over this country. None of the people that we have met during our stay have so much as acknowledged the genocide, or made any reference to ethnicity, or the history of this nation. I don’t expect them to. The past is a dark and emotional place.

Today was our first day in the city. We went to exchange our U.S. dollars for Rwandan francs. They say that you should only trust the Muslims. We made our way from the hotel with Martin at the wheel. Traffic here is consistently nerve-wracking. It’s slow traffic; we mainly travel between 10 to 15 miles per hour. But without road signs, or any attention to traffic lanes, cars, people, and motorbikes whirl around intersections and roundabouts. And there are people everywhere. Rwanda is a densely populated country, and it is apparent in Kigali. I can’t remember a street corner or sidewalk that was not thickly crowded with hundreds of people- women wearing traditional dresses, men in slacks and Oxford shirts, and teenagers in colorful t-shirts of every fashion.

It was an odd experience, to be the one that people stare at as a result of the color of my skin. Parking the car, I could hear shouts of “Amafaranga”-money. People reached open palms up to the windows of the Land Cruiser. There were others offering magazines, La Jeune Afrique, and maps of Africa. It was an intense experience, so many people, being the outsider, the colors and whirring automobiles. But the sites of the city eventually presented me with a reprieve. The hills of Kigali are covered with buildings- houses, offices, etc. It’s quite impressive. Daniel compares it to Los Angeles, and I find that interesting. Thick smog hangs above the hills, a threatening reminder of globalization, and the air that we all end up breathing.

We went to the Genocide museum. The museum itself is situation on the edge of a hill, looking out over the commercial district. We took a picture with the city set as the background. Amanda and Daniel had previously been to this museum, and I could tell that they were quietly preparing themselves. I, however, was completely unprepared for what was to happen next. The museum is thoroughly guarded by military personnel that demand empty pockets and open bags. Entry into the museum is accompanied by a brief synopsis of its opening and a description of the grounds. It was an ominous introduction. The museum itself is impeccably organized, starting with a history of ethnic tensions in Rwanda, and progressing chronologically all the way to the present, and the issues that confront Rwanda today. The museum is filled with photographs and descriptions of the genocide that are unforgiving of history and brutally realistic. The exhibition is spotted with video interviews of survivors. They spoke of their experience, and the horrors that they witnessed, the family members that died, and the people that had perpetrated these crimes. To compare the Rwandan genocide to others throughout history would be inaccurate. Here the genocide was not perpetrated by a military, but by one “ethnic” group against another. It was not about an ideology, other than some fabrication of Hutu superiority perhaps. The genocide was neighbors, families, and acquaintances killing one another. Over a million people were murdered within 100 days, not to mention the 2 million refugees and internally displaced people. It was a systematic approach to mass murder that included a majority of the population, incited by the government and the media, and ignored by the global community at large. Not only is it a scar on the history of Rwanda, but a scar on the history of the international community.

This was all very moving. At the end of the first exhibit there were three rooms. Each had a different theme, and each had a different video interview to accompany it. In the first room, the walls were covered with pictures of the victims. The second, I refused to walk into because it was filled with the skulls and bones of the dead. And the third was filled with clothes, reminders of the humanity of the victims. I found the video in the third room to be particularly motivating. The interviews were about forgiveness. Can survivors forgive? One said that he must know whom he is forgiving, that someone must ask for forgiveness. Another said that only God can forgive, it was not her responsibility. The third said that forgiveness was not the question, but his responsibility to maintain a connection with other survivors. To even contemplate forgiveness after such a tragedy was astonishing. I began to empathize with the realities of reconciliation and forgetting. I realized why no one talks about it.

At this point, I felt exhausted and overwhelmed, but the museum went on. The upstairs had a chronology of other genocides throughout history, the Armenians, the Holocaust, among others. We went in the wrong door, so we viewed the exhibit backwards. It was more crowded than the first exhibit had been, and I was still consumed by the potency of the first exhibit so I didn’t really absorb much of this one. Next, we went through the children’s exhibit. It was a brief section; the walls were covered with enlarged photographs of maybe 10 or 15 children, victims of the genocide. On the placards in front of the wall it had the child’s name, favorite past-times, favorite toy, common behavior, favorite food, followed by a blunt description of how the child was killed. So the placard went something like this: Didier, chips and cake, quiet and well-behaved, toy car, stabbed in the eyes and head. The somewhat light-spirited categories that outlined each child were powerful juxtaposed with a brutal retelling of that child’s death in the genocide. Though it was the shortest exhibit in the museum, I found it to be the most powerful. The child victims of the genocide were described as “The Ones who should Have Been the Future.” This is a powerful message. Has Rwanda’s future been stunted? The genocide forever changed the face of this country and the entire world. Its brutality has been unmatched. Machetes, clubs, and mostly any blunt object were used in the murder of over one million people. As we walked outside into the garden, I again expected a reprieve. The gardens were beautiful, and overlooked the city from a well-thought out angle. But I remembered the introduction to the museum. The curator told us that around 280,000 victims were interred throughout the gardens, mostly in mass graves. I can’t find the words to describe how I felt about this, how I still feel. My stomach sank, and a sadness came over me. Even now, it’s hard to think about, and it’s even more difficult to write. The museum was incredibly powerful, and I would recommend it to anyone. It is something of beauty, but also something of disgusting tragedy. It provides a deeper understanding of this country, and of its people- of their kindness and their ability to reconcile. But it depicts a violent past. I suppose there are contradictions within every culture, unresolved paradoxes. I find those in Rwanda to especially delicate, wounds that are fresh. Rwandans seem to be a delicate people, a loving people. Their culture is far different from my own, but similarities are never too hard to find.