Kigali and the Rwandan Genocide

Tuesday-Wednesday, September 3-4, 2024

Kigali and the Rwandan Genocide

First impressions of Kigali are that we are back in a developing country, unlike in Uganda where things seem stagnant at a very undeveloped level.  Things here look lovely, there is much work evident on esthetics, and people seem far more prosperous than they did in Uganda.  A piece of evidence both trivial and telling: the roads are beautifully maintained, and the busy roads have attractive medians with trees and flowers: 

On the last Saturday of each month, the whole country shuts down and everyone goes out cleaning—picking up roadside trash, sweeping, whatever needs to be done.  This includes the president, who sets the example.  As a result, things are spotless.  There is no trash along the roads, there is no graffiti, and everyone has an interest in keeping the country lovely.  What a wonderful idea!

 Our first two days in Rwanda were devoted to learning about the 1994 genocide.  Everything which has a time element here is dated either pre- or post-genocide.  It is spoken of often, and is part of many conversations.

 There is so much to learn and to tell, from the invention of the ethnic groups Hutu and Tutsi by the colonizing powers (particularly the Belgians) to the systemic denigration of the Tutsi minority by the government.  It all culminated in a one-month massacre of 1,000,000 Tutsi by their soldiers as well as by their neighbors, and it all was done face-to-face, with small arms (soldiers) and machetes (the general population).  The stories are unfathomable; the parallels to the Holocaust are many.

On Tuesday we visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial, an extremely well-done museum on the site of a mass grave for 259,000 people.  We each were given an earpiece and an electronic instrument which played a narration at each location in the Memorial.  At the entrance, we each were given a rose to place at the site of the mass grave: 

Kigali has “emerged as one of the cleanest, safest and most attractive capitals in all of Africa” (from our documents).  “The 1994 genocide left Rwanda in shambles: huge swaths of the educated workforce were killed or fled, looting was rampant, and cash crops withered from neglect…  President Paul Kagame is largely credited with Rwand’s remarkable transformation into a thriving, peaceful nation.”

 The first thing Kagame did was to eliminate the death penalty.  Perpetrators were rounded up, imprisoned, and tried.  The organizers of the genocide were tried in Tanzania and are still imprisoned there, 30 years later.  The local perpetrators were many; they were tried, imprisoned, and in a truly remarkable way, allowed to have their sentences shortened if they evidenced sincere repentance, as evidenced by returning to the sites of their murders, helping villagers identify where they had buried their victims, assisting in the unearthing and dignified reburial of those they murdered, and winning forgiveness from the victims’ families.

In a truly remarkable undertaking, a handful of new villages was created.  Free land and homes were given to perpetrators who had served the bulk of their sentences and were accepted into the village by the victims and families of victims, who also were given free land.  The perpetrators and the victims were given the building materials and erected homes, helping each other, and adjacent to each other in the new villages.  The villages served as models of both forgiveness and reconciliation.

We visited one of these villages in the Bugesera district; here’s the home of one of the victims: 

They are constructed of bricks made of mud and straw:  

Each has a plot of land for subsistence farming; we learned how to harvest and plant casava, a staple of the diet:

We helped the villagers prepare the lunch we would share: 

We then had a remarkable meeting.  Many of the villagers mixed with us in a large circle: 

Through a translator, we heard the story of one perpetrator, who, after eight years in prison, and with much prison counseling, began to accept his role in perpetrating a massacre.  In a kind of work-release program he began building this village, and he was released after ten years to come live here.  We also heard from a victim—a woman who was a child in 1994 and saw her entire family murdered in front of her with machetes.  Here they are, with the translator in the middle: 

I’ve been trying to process this scene since we left.  I can almost get to the forgiveness, but it’s really hard to understand the reconciliation.  We learned that many who survived are unwilling to forgive and to reconcile with the perpetrators, but these Reconciliation Villages set a powerful example.

Tomorrow we leave for Akagera National Park.