2 January, 2012
The sun was shining bright this morning as we awoke for our last day in Africa. Here in Kigali we can still hear the sounds of birds laughing at us, and smell the crisp fresh air—for some reason it doesn’t seem to be as polluted as other East African countries. The Monday following New Years Eve (when New Years falls on a weekend) is a holiday—so we were told the genocide memorial sites would be closed (these are churches where many Tutsis sought refuge thinking they would be safe, but instead were the site of mass murders by the Hutus). We were slightly bummed, as there is not much else to do in Kigali. Although we had already spent a good part of the day at the Genocide Memorial Museum in Kigali before heading to the gorillas, we were told the other sites are extremely powerful as well and worth the trek.
After breakfast we took a walk up, up, and up some more. I can’t help but think that these Rwandans must have some nice looking calves, probably all the Rwandans do in this hilly nation. After some debate and talking to travel agents who had no idea as to whether or not the sites were open today we decided to give it a go. After all, we’re in Rwanda and even if the sites were closed, it would be an adventure and surely worth the trip.
Since spending $80 on a private taxi isn’t really our style, we headed to the taxi park (here they call it bus park) with a few location pronoun pronunciations at the tip of our tongues ready to inquire about our destination. Two muzungus walk into the Kigali bus park with no luggage and they are going to one place. “Nyamata, here!” We were shown a matatu just about fully occupied ready to take us in. Are all these people going to the memorial sites? Turns out, there are a lot of other reasons to go to this town.
After a beautiful 50-minute ride, we arrived at the tiny town of Nyamata in the Bugasero district. Although no part of Rwanda was spared in the genocide, the Bugesero district was hardest hit due to the high concentration of Tutsi people living there. Back during the first few genocides in the area, around the 1950s, they were in some ways banished to the area, because of its high concentration of wild buffalo, elephant and other dangerous animals. The Tutsi people, over the years, built a nice place for themselves in the Bugasero area. From the town center, we hopped on a couple of “motos” (motor bikes) and the drivers escorted us to the first site. On a money-saving side note, we ended up spending $16 on transportation (and met some interesting locals along the way not to mention the scenic and exhilarating moto ride), and decided that we need to re-write the guidebooks.
We drove about 5 minutes to the main Nyamata church. It had purple and white ribbons around the building and its columns. Inside there were the triangle flags hanging from string sloping between the building’s support beams (these were also in purple and white, but were of the same type that we see at car dealerships). I will admit that my naïve initial thought was that this was in anticipation of a wedding celebration, as it did resemble the decorations of the one African wedding I attended. I was very wrong.
There is very much an exhibit here—and it is very disturbing. The objects on display are in the open: clothing, bones, jewelry worn by victims, pens, student notebooks, machetes used to kill thousands of people, and a stick used to torture and brutalize women in the worst way imaginable.
The glass encasement surrounding the bones was open, the mass graves are still receiving remains. In one part of our tour there were two bags with a typed name on a single sheet of paper. One bag was filled with human remains, the other held the clothing of the victim, who, like many, was hiding in the field where he was killed on the spot, undiscovered until yesterday (17 years later). Apparently this is a common scenario. A past so near you can touch it.
Much like my grandmother once led a group of visitors to the Birkenau concentration camp and told them the layout of the camp and how events occurred there, our guide at the second church we visited was a survivor. He is a Tutsi, the group that was the focus of the genocide, who hid in a swamp for two weeks after his father was shot dead in front of their house walking in for lunch. Our guide fled, narrowly escaping more bullets fired into their property. He ran and never saw his mother and all but one of his brothers again. He heard the grenade explosions at the church we were at that are still evident by the jagged gaping holes decorating its walls.
In Nyamata the first evidence of the massacre is the exposed brick beneath the cement ground just outside the threshold. The black security swinging gate is missing some of its crossbars. The explosions around and in the church are a consequence of victims in the church staving off their eventual killers for a few days until backup (the government soldiers in this case) was called and grenades and guns arrived at the site. Both guides made a point to emphasize the role the government played in carrying out the genocide. Civilians, who made up both the militia and the victims, were not allowed to carry firearms.
In both church memorial sites clothing was a prominent feature on display. The clothing on the inside of the Naymaya church lay on benches. Heaps of clothing are piled so that you cannot see the several layers on the bottom. Once inside, visitors are surrounded by articles of clothing worn by the victims the day they were killed. In the back, between the two entrances is a large alcove piled with the clothes children were wearing. When adults realized that the end for them was imminent, they begged mercy for the children and babies, separating them in another part of the church where they huddled together. No mercy was shown, instead children and babies were killed in the most gruesome manner: the killers held their leg and smashed them against the wall.
The shirts and dresses, once full of color and life, look like old dirty rags. Everything was blood-soaked immediately after the massacre, so all the articles have a similar brownish stale color to them. The floors, we were told, was a large pool of blood.
The ceiling also has bloodstains as grenade explosions left pieces shooting through the ceiling. The evidence of this event is everywhere.
Relatives of the victims dug mass gravesites both inside the Nyamata church and immediately behind. There are hundreds of skulls—some depicting exactly how each individual probably perished. Mostly, there are machete wounds on the skulls, sometimes a skull shows a gaping hole in the head or where the eye socket was. One skull had a bullet or the tip of a spear still lodged inside it.
Ten thousand people lost their lives at one church over two days, five thousand at the second, also over two days. Thousands of Tutsis gathered in the church thinking that it would be a safe haven as it had been in past Tutsi killing sprees—surely other Christians would not murder people in the house of God. Instead this place of peace became an easy target for the murderers as there was nowhere to run. To make this already nauseating story worse—neighbors, classmates, and friends were committing the killings. The efficiency of the 100 days of genocide in 1994, resulting in the death of 800,000 innocent people was largely because the killers were part of the community, all over the country, each one having inside information. Hutus were the majority of the population, and had deliberately and systematically been brainwashed by the government in preparation for the genocide. There was nowhere to run.
At the second site we visited, after our tour concluded, I asked the guide what he thought when seeing victims of the genocide with missing limbs (many of whom beg for money)? He mentioned something about the importance of being present for those absent and not absent in one’s presence. He went on to tell us that he often gives motivational talks to young survivors about the importance of looking toward a bright future instead of letting their ideas and spirit be drowned in the wake of the terrible genocide He is trying to be an honest, stand-up person who exudes the gentleness and fortitude of his lost parents. He built a new house on the same site of the destroyed home he was raised in. He is married and now has a daughter. He is the presence of the victims and tries to embody their best characteristics.
It is a very sad, terrible, and unimaginable event to scar such a beautiful country. The paradox between it’s gorgeous lush rolling hills that rumble along to the sunset and the ugliness of what happened in those hills is hard to ever fully understand. Rwanda is now one of the safest and most developed countries in Africa. The new government has made valiant efforts to erase the Tutsi and Hutu labels. Now all Rwandans are Rwandans. While that doesn’t make what happened any easier to digest, it does provide hope for a more peaceful future.
