Carrying Weight: Rwandan Genocide Memorials (Part 1)
This essay is the first of a two-part series. Follow link to Part 2 here.
Last April I was in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Having worked there over several years, partnering with a government agency on conservation of genocide memorials, I was invited to attend the opening of the annual commemoration—Kwibuka—for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1994 genocide.
Rwandans welcome outsiders/internationals attending Kwibuka, giving global dimension to the commemoration, bearing of witness, and rebuilding of their country. The official events revolved around a serious, sedate, professional series of presentations at the big new convention center in Kigali. The speeches were powerful and memorable: Jean-Damascène Bizimana, head of the National Commission for the Fight against Genocide (CNLG) voicing the determination to remember, the Belgian foreign minister’s stirring appeal to conscience, and the gravity and stern warnings of President Kagame.
I also spent part of that week in Nyamata, the small town where my team and I have been working since 2016.[1] I’ve spent many hours there, but never before in April. The memorial in Nyamata originally was a Catholic church that, like other churches and schools, became a site of mass murder in 1994 (figure 1). As a memorial, the intimacy of the building, site, collections and people convey powerful senses of sadness and absence, and, even for an outsider like me, a profound place to reflect on the horror and violence of the genocide against the Tutsi.
“the memorials are meant to help carry the weight of genocide”
This pair of commemorative experiences, in Kigali and Nyamata, reflected an abiding challenge in remembering the genocide: reconciling the presentist, social uses of heritage with the personal experiences of individual survivors and visitors responding to a traumatic history. Setting aside the professional work of conservation, training and research, this time of year finds me in awe of my Rwandan colleagues and friends. And, here in Philadelphia, reckoning with my own connection to what remains—twenty-six years later—a fraught, troubled, and tender situation.
Figure 1. Façade of Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Nyamata, Rwanda, 2016. Photograph by Randall Mason.
The larger roads in Rwanda, two-lane macadam highways, teem with every sort of traffic. Trucks, cars and buses on longer hauls; people walking to work and kids skipping to/from school; motorbike taxis weaving across the lanes; workers sweeping and weeding the verges; goods going to market carried on heads and the backs of bicycles. When I remember those roads, from the quiet of my desk at home, two images stick in my mind: the ballet of all the traffic, in which so many different vehicles at such different speeds weave and brake in such close range without (many) disasters; and the weight carried by ordinary Rwandans, such a lot of stuff, carried a long way and with such strength and grace that it seems superhuman. Could you walk on a highway shoulder balancing a couple of dozen big avocados on your head? Could you pedal six boy-sized stalks of bananas on the back of your bike, for 10 or 20km, up and down the famous “milles collines” of the country’s nickname? I doubt I’d make it. But ordinary Rwandans bear such weight as a matter of routine. The simple but deep exertions of Rwandans to carry great weight relates to the reason I’ve traveled there a dozen times in the last five years: helping conserve the memorials created to remember the 1994 genocide that decimated this small East African country.
There are eight national-level memorials to the genocide managed by CNLG. Many other memorials contribute to Rwandan commemoration, kept by district and local governments, and other agencies, groups and families. But my work has focused on the national memorials, owing to a direct partnership with CNLG and to their conscious, national policy of centralizing and formalizing commemoration of the genocide against the Tutsi at these few authorized sites. Full understanding of the processes by which Rwandan genocide memorials have been formed and evolved is not well documented, and is the subject of ongoing research.[2]
Like the extraordinary burdens carried on the side of the road, the memorials are meant to help carry the weight of genocide, marking and remembering the violence, evil, sadness and pain of the one hundred days across a spring and summer when Hutu victimized Tutsi, and at least 800,000 Rwandans were killed by other Rwandans, often by hand and by their neighbors.
“The design and presentation at the memorials themselves–particularly the collections–are graphic and direct. ”
The Rwandan genocide defies brief explanation, but it is important to see the deeper roots underlying the massive killing of 1994. Belgian colonization hardened distinctions between socio-economic groups (Tutsi and Hutu) into political factions. Inter-faction violence, manipulated by Belgium, started as early as 1959 and continued, episodically, into the 1990s. Killing of Tutsi had become commonplace, especially in the Bugesera, the region where Nyamata is located. President Habyarimana’s plane-crash death in Kigali on April 7, 1994, marked the beginning of the 100 days of killing and torture now commemorated, but belies the deeper origins of the genocide. Researchers have documented the long, slow-burning and carefully planned lead-up to April 1994. Many knew genocide was coming; few could or did do anything to stop it.[3]
The violence memorialized at sites across the country was chilling; the stories, collections, and experience of the memorials is suitably heartbreaking. The memorials are part of Rwandans’ effort to face the trauma of genocide and colonialism without being overwhelmed or defeated by it. Indeed, the government mindfully uses the memorials (and other processes of remembrance, justice and reconciliation) to maintain political and social order. The Rwandan government has been very successful at instrumentalizing heritage, and not without controversy. As veteran researcher Timothy Longman frames it, “the post-genocide government of Rwanda has undertaken an extraordinarily far-reaching program of social engineering…. Using commemorations and memorials, judicial processes, historical revision… and many other programs… to transform the ways individual Rwandans understand their social identities.”[4]
Rwanda isn’t the only place living with a legacy of genocide or other cultural trauma. Nor is it the only place whose culture is so centered on traumatic heritage and processes of conserving and interpreting it. But Rwanda of the last twenty-five years stands out for the intensity of the genocide; for the shameful inaction of those who could have prevented, stopped or at least mitigated it; and for tightly controlled, assertive uses of heritage, memory and conservation to recover from collective trauma.
Rwandan genocide memorials manage to be, at once, un-curated (sites and artifacts are presented simply, informally, and slightly disordered) and carefully scripted (the historical narratives are narrowly crafted and aligned with political messaging) (figure 2). They are designed without great care, but meticulously maintained.
Figure 2. Interior, looking from altar to daychapel, Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Nyamata, Rwanda, 2019. Photograph by Kaitlyn Levesque. Use courtesy of PennPraxis.
All but two of the national memorials (Gisozi, or the Kigali Genocide Memorial, and Rebero—both located in Kigali) were sites of mass murder. As the violence began in April 1994, Tutsi gathered for refuge at church complexes (Nyamata, Ntarama, Nyarubuye, Nyange), school campuses (Murambi) (figure 3), or hillsides (Rebero, Bisesero) (figure 4). So gathered in numbers, Tutsi were trapped and slaughtered by genocidaires–Hutu interahamwe militias and government troops.
Figure 3. Murambi Genocide Memorial, Rwanda, 2019. Photograph by Randall Mason.
Figure 4. Bisesero Genocide Memorial, Rwanda, 2018. Photograph by Randall Mason.
Today, set apart from the busy roads, shops, and agricultural fields of workaday Rwanda, the memorials present an air of detachment while conveying a sense of purpose. Once you notice them, they are unmistakable; placid and quiet against the chaotic histories and memories rooted there. They maintain the feel of a something between a cemetery, a museum and an archive; visits to the sites are shaped by spatial thresholds (walking through gates, entering spaces literally marked by murder), behavioral filters (an educational experience, mourning, morbid curiosity), and anesthetic rules (be quiet, don’t touch) (figure 5).
Figure 5. Entry courtyard of Nyarubuye Genocide Memorial, Rwanda, 2018. Photograph by Randall Mason.
The design and presentation at the memorials themselves–particularly the collections–are graphic and direct. The intention is to connect viscerally with survivors, to confront and challenge viewers. Human remains (principally bones) and collections of weapons or belongings of the victims are openly displayed to provoke sympathy, shock, pathos, and awe at the violence and scale of the genocidal killings.[5] There is a great deal for the visitor to take in; and difficult witness for survivors to bear (figures 6 and 7).
Figure 6. Display of collections, Nyarubuye Genocide Memorial, Rwanda, 2018. Photograph by Randall Mason.
Figure 7. Display of collections, Nyarubuye Genocide Memorial, Rwanda, 2018. Photograph by Randall Mason.
These sites are asked to do a lot–present evidence of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, [6] as the government officially describes the memorials; bear the national iconography of victimhood and recovery; support survivors; accommodate burial and mourning; serve as platforms for genocide prevention educational programs; and increasingly, accommodate international visitors. They face an uncertain future in the face of decay, risks of future political instability, national development successes, and of course generational change. The Rwandan professionals managing the sites bear a great deal of responsibility with impressive dedication and grace. Yet conservation and management efforts lagged for years, and as Rwanda neared the twenty-fifth anniversary of the genocide the government began to invest more to sustain these sites—their evidence of Tutsi victimhood and calculated Hutu evil—into the future. This is where my team’s conservation work fits in. We were asked to assist the government in creating purposeful conservation strategies and practices—to sustain the existence of the sites, buildings and collections—as part of their long-running memorialization campaigns.
Follow link to Part 2 here.
NOTES
[1] As a professor and practitioner of historic preservation and city planning at University of Pennsylvania, I was approached with the opportunity to advise CNLG and first traveled to Rwanda in 2014. The first five years of work that our team has completed is summarized in “Conserving Rwandan Genocide Memorials,” APT Bulletin: Journal of Preservation Technology 50, no. 2/3 (2019): 17-26.
[2] See Delia Wendel, Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage (forthcoming); 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): https://doi.org/10.7227/HRV.1.2.6; Jens Meierhenrich, “Topographies of Remembering and Forgetting: The Transformation of Lieux de Memoire in Rwanda,” in Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence, ed. Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011); and Annalisa Bolin, “Imagining Genocide Heritage: Material Modes of Development and Preservation in Rwanda,” Journal of Material Culture (July 2019): https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183519860881
[3] More comprehensive accounts of the Rwandan genocide are found in these works: Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999); Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1998); Jean Hatzfeld, Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Other Press, 2007); Timothy Longman, Memory and Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Susan Thomson, Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
[4] Longman, Memory and Justice, 12. For valuable accounts, see Longman, and Susan Thomson, Genocide in Rwanda, Oxford Bibliography Online, Last Modified 27 February 2019.
[5] Korman examines conflicts over display of human remains in “Mobilising the Dead? The Place of Bones and Corpses in the Commemoration of the Tutsi Genocide in Rwanda.”
[6] This official framing of the genocide is used, for instance, in this government webpage reporting on the effort to list four memorial sites to the World Heritage List.
