September 3 - Inocent

Disclaimer: This post is dedicated to Inocent for always knowing how to carefully question and provoke the mind.

Today I visited the Gisozi Genocide Memorial, the Nyamata, and the Ntarama Memorial sites. The lighthearted and culturally rich feelings of Rwanda were immediately replaced with an unimaginable fear of confronting the past of 1 million deaths in three different locations.

Outside - Gisozi Memorial

The Gisozi Memorial, a more educationally-focused memorial, was beautifully positioned in a deep crevice in the heart of Kigali. As we drove toward the site on a bus, there was a tangible tension in the air, briefly broken up with small nervous laughter or a quick bus ride selfie—remnants of American privileged culture in an entirely new environment. The early morning smog was particularly intense and the condensed moisture created innumerable droplets of water along the bus windshield. It was as if we were driving through a rain storm, but the storm was a façade and the rain remained as its illusory agent, bringing bad news and uncomfortableness.

View of the city from the memorial

My lungs were stressfully coated with an unsettling amount of diesel exhaust and red dust. Beads of sweat collected on my forehead in the crowded bus, paralleling the external panes of the bus and surely exacerbated by the amount of long, conservative attire I chose to wear. I could sense something ominous in the setting and whether psychologically induced or not, I felt a presence of unimaginable death and collective misery.

Inside, the memorial did a wonderful job of providing the pretext, anatomy, and results of the genocide. Just like any other museum, the memorial highlighted specific factual conditions which led to the genocide, namely the decline in the Rwandan economy, ethnic animosity (between Hutu and Tutsi) propagated by socioeconomic disparity, hate propaganda, military supply distribution, and government opposition. The memorial effectively compared the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 with that of the Holocaust (1933-1945), the Herero and Namaqua genocide (1904-1907), the Cambodian genocide (1975-1979), and the Bosnian genocide (1992-1995).

There were several rooms which hit the heart unabashedly and permanently. One room was dedicated to the lives of children under 5, showcasing their last known picture and listing their hobbies, dreams, favorite TV shows and songs, and the manner in which they were killed. It was an unfair and eerie juxtaposition to see their smiling faces in the photo next to their cruel death. Another room was dedicated to a video of a man who tearfully recounted the last meal he shared with his mother who had gone out to search for passion fruit when their house had been pillaged and left sans food or water—a humanizing story of motherly heroism. The rooms induced a heartfelt suspension between fear, disgust, and unimaginable pain.

Wall of Names at Gisozi

Outside, the memorial contained a sacred burial ground and had a wall for the names of known victims. This portion frustrated me as I thought about all the people whose names were not honored on the wall, which was relatively small and unadorned. This made genocidal deaths seem androgynous, conglomerate, and deindividuated. Saddened by the lack of individual care for each person, I stumbled upon a single rose left on the burial grounds. Memorials are such fascinating insignias of remembrance and respect; it’s a way to say “Never Again” despite the failure of that phrase in its original convention of 1948. This rose became an engrained synecdoche for a reduction in blanketing, generalized statements which treated the 1 million victims as an anonymous bouquet. Equally important is the constant goal to see each victim for their individual story, treating them as a precious rose to preserve their last remaining breaths of dignity and agency.

Single rose on the mass graves at Gisozi

The last two memorial sites (Nyamata and Ntarama) were both churches. What was thought to have been a sacred site of religiosity and communal safety quickly transformed into a bloody massacre with no escape or refuge. At Nyamata, the guide told a story about one specific woman who was raped fifteen times before she was eventually impaled with a spear. This was not a simple massacre or ethnic war; Hutus descended into savagery and systematically killed their purported opponent with the intent of torture and eventual extermination.

Mass graves at Nyamata

As our tour guide explained to us, Tutsis were able to find sanctuary in this church during the upheavals of 1992. In 1994, however, even churches did not offer protection from the killers—5,000 Tutsi men, women and children seeking refuge were eventually murdered in the Ntarama church. Beneath the sanctuary at Nyamata is a room created to display some of the remains of the victim as well as a casket containing the body of a young woman whose torture and murder is considered to be paradigmatic of the abject brutality displayed during the Nyamata massacre.

I left all three memorial sites with a disdain for humankind. When I was a Resident Assistant, my supervisor questioned, “If we are not here to support one another, why else would we be here?” The Hutu extremist answer to that question would confer some sort of power dimension, political dominance, socioeconomic parity, or ethnic purity. I choose the path of support, of unconditional love, of respect and dignity for all human beings and cultures. I left the memorials feeling disconnected from the world, feeling alienated for my commitment to social equality, inclusiveness, and Ubuntu (generosity to all human beings). Everything that I had learned about being a good person was challenged by certain pretexts to genocide: economic decline, ethnic animosity, propaganda, etc. Could people really disengage from morality to commit heinous crimes regardless of pity or empathy?  How is it possible for human compassion and empathy to be compromised for the sake of self-betterment? I was troubled and lost, but these questions would soon be answered as I began to learn more about how it was possible to become a perpetrator from a social psychology standpoint.

At times such as this, the words “Never Again” come to us almost reflexively, but I must confess that given the tragically chronic reality of human rights abuse, these two familiar words ring increasingly hollow for me. I can’t help but think we must dig much deeper—and face more painful truths about ourselves—before uncovering the light that will that will show us the way out of the legacies bequeathed to us by places such as Nyamata and Ntarama.

Urumuri rw' icyizere
"Light of Hope" eternal flame at Ntarama

That night, Inocent, my father’s friend, left me with one final question as we sat around the dining room table. “Is it possible to rationalize genocide?” he pondered. The little man in front of me had succinctly stated what had been bothering me the past 12 hours. Was it possible to rationalize evil? Why did so many people, regular ordinary citizens join the Interahamwe and kill so many innocent people? There had to be a hook and I was faithfully ready to discover what that was and confront evil face-to-face. 

“If you knew me and you really knew yourself, you would not have killed me.” - Felicien Ntagengwa