David, age 10, killed by machete

A few days ago our group of students visited the Kigali Memorial Center in downtown Kigali.  The grounds include some memorial gardens, a museum documenting the 1994 genocide, and mass graves containing around 250,000 genocide victims.  It’s both impressive and informative.  We took a generally self-led tour using audio guides that began with a flame that burns for 100 days every April-July (to signify the ~100 days of genocide).  We then walked past the rows of mass graves, with one grave still prior to completion (they continue to transfer bodies to the site as more graves are found elsewhere).  After that we walked through gardens with varying meanings and fountains representing unity followed by division.  The museum itself was created by the same group that designed the Holocaust Centre in the UK, and it looks like it was made with as much care.  All captions are written in Kinyarwanda, French, and English, and video clips provide options for subtitles. 

As a little background, since the genocide was so widespread, Rwanda enacted a judicial process called Gacaca courts for perpetrators of the genocide.  Here, people could confess to murders (aka “work”) in exchange for reduced sentences (i.e. 10 years of prison for 10+ murders).  One of the most interesting videos in the museum was of a man listing off who he had killed at such a court.  He showed no remorse and almost seemed put off by the questioning.  Keeping in mind that the Hutu were killing the Tutsis during the genocide, he also explained how he prevented the death of a Hutu woman who had married a Tutsi.  While he hacked her arm with a machete for her choice of a spouse, he made it sound as though it would have been barbaric to let others kill her for her spouse alone.  It was as disturbing as it was fascinating.

The museum tour winds down with some history of other genocides (e.g. The Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia) and ends with rooms dedicated to children of the genocide.  Sparsely decorated, the rooms present brief pictures of children who were murdered 17 years ago.  Each picture is accompanied by the child’s name, age at death, favorite food, aspirations in life, and mode of death.  One example that stood out was David who wanted to be a doctor.  Killed by machete at 10 years of age. 

-Scott

A line of roses has been laid along the edge of a mass grave along the outskirts of the memorial grounds.  Noticing a few red roses mixed in with mostly white, I took the opportunity to take a picture drawing focus to the individual in the sea of death.