Carrying Weight: Rwandan Genocide Memorials (Part 2)
Follow link to Part 1 here.
The genocide memorial at Nyamata is located on the southern margins of the town, 100m west of the main road (figures 8 and 9). A sign on the two-lane macadam points to the church’s neighborhood (figure 10). The one-hectare site centers on what was originally a Roman Catholic church, facing an open campus of schools, church buildings and laterite roads. (Laterite is the local bedrock—distinctively bright red—and most roads are simply packed earth laterite). Nyamata Memorial draws power from bearing direct witness to the violence, bearing its own scars and sheltering the clothes, bones and blood of the victims. Shrapnel and bullet damage to concrete floors, brick walls, iron gates and the metal roofs have been carefully retained and conserved.
Figure 8. Site plan, Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Nyamata, Rwanda, 2018. Drawn by PennPraxis. Reproduced with permission.
Figure 9. Aerial photograph, Nyamata, Rwanda, 2020. Google Earth.
Figure 10. Road sign, Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Nyamata, Rwanda, 2016. Photograph by Randall Mason.
Figure 11. Architecture journal spread showing a plan and section of Bernard Jobin’s Nyamata Church. From Architecture Suisse 54 (November 1982): 54.1-54.4. Reproduced with permission, copyright Ed. Anthony Krafft/Pully—Switzerland: www.architecturesuisse.ch.
The church was completed in 1982, the brilliant and refined design of a Swiss priest-architect named Fr. Bernard Jobin who built dozens of projects in East Africa (figure 11). Thousands of Tutsi sought refuge in and around the church—as in other Catholic churches in Bugesera and around the country—in the madness and bloodshed of April 1994. They had gathered here before. During earlier pulses of genocidal violence against the Tutsi, they were encouraged to seek refuge in churches, schools and other community places.
“experiential authenticity of the site is … key to its success”
Figure 12. Damage to original metal gate; new gate (in white), Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Nyamata, Rwanda, 2019. Photograph by Kaitlyn Levesque. Courtesy of PennPraxis.
On April 15, Hutu genocidaires and military broke into the building with grenades, slaughtering Tutsi men, women and children with machetes, clubs, and guns. The sanctuary was left a tangle of broken bodies, belongings, and pews. The numerical toll of the genocide here, in the weeks spanning April and May, was between 3,000 and 10,000 victims (in and around the church itself; from 45,000 to 50,000 people in the surrounding area).[7]
Within a few years after the 1994 genocide, local survivors worked to retrieve scattered and hastily buried bodies. Separating human remains from other material, they began the conservation and commemorative processes, including the clothes of the victims. By 1997, the church was deconsecrated so it could be formalized as a memorial to the genocide against the Tutsi. New mass graves were dug, and lined with concrete; bullet- and mortar-damage to the church building was carefully retained and stabilized (not repaired) (figure 12).
Figure 13. Altar, with cloth and object collection, Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Nyamata, Rwanda, 2019. Photograph by Randall Mason.
The altar at the east side of the sanctuary, the floor gently raking toward it, remains intact but has a new function. It is now a place to display piles of artifacts left behind by victims: rosaries, eyeglasses, buttons, identity cards and more, piled on a faded, blood-stained cotton altar cloth (figure 13). A statue of the Virgin Mary overlooks the room; bullet-holes in the roof have been retained (figure 14).
Figure 14. Virgin Mary statue, ceiling with bullet-holes, Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Nyamata, Rwanda, 2019. Photograph by Kaitlyn Levesque. Courtesy of PennPraxis.
Copious piles of victims’ clothes were simply piled on top of the pews in the church sanctuary (figure 15). There they have remained, more or less, for twenty years, a collection whose presence marks absence: trousers, sweater and blouses; sports jerseys and t-shirts; bold African-print dresses. The textiles bear the marks of 1994 and the years of weathering since; soiled and torn, rife with bodily fluids from that spring twenty-five years ago, stained with laterite dust.
The PennDesign team’s partnership with CNLG centers on training government staff in conservation principles and techniques, and working collaboratively to apply this training directly to the conservation of Nyamata’s site, buildings and collections.[8] Through the training and capacity-building, prototyping and implementation of conservation at Nyamata, we address many aspects of the preservation process (planning, management, architectural conservation, site development, collections treatment, interpretation) and engage as holistically as possible with the wide range of scales and materials (buildings, landscape, and collections, in particular textiles) (figures 16, 17, 18).[9]
The partnership has made good progress at Nyamata. We stay focused on crafting preservation strategies that are sustainable in the Rwandan context. And we stay centered on maintaining the social and experiential functions of the site as a memorial, not on fetishizing one or another aspect of the site’s material fabric. The function of the memorial relies strongly on material integrity and spatial fixity, of course, but cannot be conflated with them—experiential authenticity of the site is another key to its success (figures 19 and 20).
Figure 15. Textile collection displayed on pews, Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Nyamata, Rwanda, 2019. Photograph by Kaitlyn Levesque. Courtesy of PennPraxis.
Figure 16. Tabernacle, at the base of the tower, partly obscured by pile of textiles, Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Nyamata, Rwanda, 2019. Photograph by Kaitlyn Levesque. Courtesy of PennPraxis.
Figure 17. Platform for textile collection display (newly excavated, unprocessed textiles in white sacks), daychapel, Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Nyamata, Rwanda, 2019. Photograph by Kaitlyn Levesque. Courtesy of PennPraxis.
“Nyamata and the other Rwandan sites… push us to confront the more ambiguous, fugitive aspects of heritage and conservation practices.”
Figure 18. Conservation storage for passive drying of textiles, sacristy, Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Nyamata, Rwanda, 2019. Photograph by Martin Muhoza. Reproduced with permission.
The clothes, the human remains, the church building and the site contribute to the whole experience and function of the memorial. We acknowledge the difficult and changing politics of Rwandan genocide commemoration (while trying not to be captive to them), and recognize our role as cultural outsiders. Rwandans can and do make the decisions, and they value our advice (in part; they don’t take all of it!). But our success, in the end, will be judged by the relevance and availability of this heritage far into the future. As we work today with CNLG, we ultimately are working for future generations of Rwandans.
Figure 19. View across the Nyamata sanctuary (note the slot of light between wall top and roof assembly, the architect’s reference to Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp chapel), Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Nyamata, Rwanda, 2019. Photograph by Kaitlyn Levesque. Courtesy of PennPraxis.
Nyamata and the other Rwandan sites present technical and managerial challenges, of course, but more profoundly they push us to confront the more ambiguous, fugitive aspects of heritage and conservation practices: the puzzle of designing solutions that satisfy a multitude of purposes; fixing urgent problems now while ensuring very-long-term integrity of the sites; the unintended friction, slack, and excitement of collaboration; and the trade-offs between protecting heritage values and honoring social and societal values. This work on Rwanda’s traumatic heritage places provides these challenges and more, in the face of urgency one rarely feels in conservation.
Figure 20. View across the valley of the Akanyaru River, from the site of a local memorial, looking down into the marshes used as refuge during the 1994 genocide, near Ntarama, Rwanda, 2019. Photograph by Randall Mason.
In his speech at the twenty-fifth national commemoration on April 7, 2019, Rwandan President Paul Kagame noted, “Our people have carried an immense weight with little or no complaint.” Our hope is that the memorials at Nyamata and elsewhere continue to work for future generations of Rwandans, as they continue to bear the weight of the genocide.
Follow link to Part 1 here.
NOTES
[7] Counts are uncertain and sources vary on the details. These figures are based on several sources: Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999); Genocide Archive of Rwanda; Jean Hatzfeld, Blood Papa: Rwanda’s New Generation. trans. Joshua David Jordan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018); Rachel Murekatete (site manager, CNLG), in discussion with the author, June 2016.
[8] The author is principal investigator and lead planner for the project. Other principals contributing to the project are Adjunct Professor of Architecture Michael Henry and textile conservator Julia Brennan. Project staff have included Laura Lacombe, Julia Griffith, Kaitlyn Levesque, Charlette Caldwell, Marius Roussouw, and Kaitlyn Munro. Funding support has been provided by the US Department of State, Big Future Group, and PennDesign.
[9] Textile conservation has been a strong focus of my team’s work. For an overview, see Mason, “Conserving Rwandan Genocide Memorials,” APT Bulletin: Journal of Preservation Technology 50, no. 2/3 (2019): 17-26. Human remains are present at all Rwandan national genocide memorials. Some of the accompanying photographs include human remains (bones) although more graphic representations have purposefully been excluded here. Our team has not worked directly on conservation of human remains (other experts advise on that issue). See Rémi Korman, “Mobilising the Dead? The Place of Bones and Corpses in the Commemoration of the Tutsi Genocide in Rwanda,” Human Remains and Violence 1, no. 2 (2015): 56–70.
