It is April again, and the rains have returned. They are accompanied by reflection and sorrow across Rwanda, a time when communities come together to discuss genocide and demagoguery and publicly mourn the murdered. It has been seventeen torturous Aprils since the most horrific mass murder in human history, but I think the pain and anguish, so expertly veiled at other times, wells up in the weeks surrounding Genocide memorial week. At the last moment I decided to forgo the large ceremony at the national stadium two Thursdays ago, the beginning of Memorial Week, and instead sat at home quietly contemplating my role here. I had decided beforehand to share thoughts I had already put to paper, so I spent my day making final revisions, listening to the rain softly patter on my blue tin roof.
The following remarks are adapted from an open letter I began drafting shortly after visiting a Genocide memorial with other WorldTeach volunteers in early January 2010. The impulse to write the letter was intense disgust, but it became a familiar crutch to revisit during my service last year – a reminder of Rwanda’s extraordinary context. I wrote and rewrote the letter for most of last year before submitting it to WorldTeach administrators, returning every few weeks to reassess my feelings. I’m sharing my thoughts here not because I think they are particularly unique or insightful, but because my perspective now isn’t part of any ‘Rwanda’ discussion I ever had. I also hope the letter will be included in future orientation sessions should WorldTeach return to Rwanda.
The Catholic church at Nyamata is located on an unpaved side road about a mile from the bus stop in Nyamata’s town center, off the main road running south from Kigali towards Kirundo and the Burundian border. At the time of our visit, the dusty dirt road wound past homes, a sleepy police station, an expanding school with half-built buildings, and seemingly vacant Caritas offices. At a crossroads, the church appeared ringed with high metal fences painted a brilliant bright white. The grounds, as at the Kigali Memorial Center, were immaculately kept with precisely trimmed green grass, neat rows of bright perennials, and showy palm trees.
Two Rwandese men greeted us at the entrance and led two groups through the church in broken but understandable English. It quickly became clear that both men were survivors of local massacres fifteen years ago. In 1994, thousands of mostly Tutsi crowded into the church and the immediate surroundings, hoping the church would bring protection. Nearly every single man, woman, and child was murdered.
The church itself is chilling. Inside it is filled with old wooden pews heaped with the muddy clothes of the victims. During our visit, an odd atmospheric light filtered in through the back of the church, and a heavy, humid, still air hung over everything. The interior was silent save for the guide’s hushed voice and insects buzzing and birds chirping noisily overhead. The tin roof and concrete floor are clearly pockmarked with grenade blasts. Oxidized blood stains are still visible on the ceiling and walls. In one section of the church, children’s clothes are piled onto the floor where children under four were mercilessly slaughtered. At the altar, one survivor recounted the brutal mutilation and murder of a Hutu woman and her Tutsi husband. A vault for a mass grave sits underneath the church, and large mass grave chambers are located outside behind the church where coffins and bones are stacked meters deep. Cracked and crushed skulls, reconstructed after exhumation, and tattered identity cards are irrefutable evidence of the overwhelming cruelty that characterized the killings.
The scale of death at Nyamata is paralyzing and truly terrifying. I could not finish the tour. Being confronted with Nyamata, the need to seriously reassess how to think about the Rwandan genocide became clear. Sitting outside the church as I waited for the rest of the volunteers to conclude the tour, I struggled to justify visiting the church. I felt ashamed, sad, and regretful that I had traveled to the memorial site. To be perfectly frank, visiting Nyamata was not enlightening. The church is a crime scene and a grave, not a museum. I realized, too late, what a naïve and macabre farce it is to need to see a crime scene or grave to believe mass murders should be prevented.
What’s more, attempting to pay homage to those who died there seemed to me empty and trite. Nyamata holds no connections; I neither knew any of the victims, nor understand the pain of the survivors. In reality, I felt as an interlocutor, a voyeur, an atrocity tourist invading the memory of Nyamata and its residents for no good reason. The church is their memorial, a place to teach their children, a place to remember their dead.
Visiting Nyamata only reinforced the distance and detachment I have to the crimes of 1994 and genocide. Platitudes about genocide’s debasement of humanity hide an ugly truth: genocide has always terrorized particular men, women, and children, who, forgotten by the world, each die a very personal death or suffer some other terrible trauma. I fear genocide’s victims are not only dehumanized by its perpetrators, but also necessarily dehumanized by passive bystanders. Either way, genocide does not affirm humanity, it unequivocally denies it. Accordingly, calling genocide an affront to all of humanity seems to me a cruel joke perpetrated by people untouched by such depraved violence – who can rightly own genocide without paying a terrible price? And that price cannot be paid by traveling to far-flung memorials to the dead, regardless of the country or crime. I know this will not inherently strengthen my resolve to help prevent future crimes. If such resolve is to be genuine and actionable, I believe it must be an intrinsic and unshakable moral imperative, not developed through some emotive learning exercise. After all, Nyamata is a searing condemnation of humanity’s collective inaction and refusal to “learn.”
Today, the Rwanda of 1994 seems both distant and immediate. Kigali bustles with orderly energy and has a friendly vibe. Business does well, crime is low, education and technology are priorities, and people are outwardly eager to improve their lives and better themselves. But in the evening, as traffic quiets and all that remains are the twittering birds, the buzzing insects, and the soft rustle of a moist cool breeze, I must resist feeling transported to 1994. I must resist the impactful images from Nyamata which gnaw at my consciousness, and I must resist grasping at comprehension, as the mind tries to distill the fear and blood of seventeen years ago. I must resist trying to purposefully identify with the victims and the perpetrators. It’s not easy. As distinctly social creatures, I believe we seek out experiences which help us identify with others, but I’ve learned to be very wary of such feelings.
Reflective speculation is a poor substitute for action and responsibility. “Never again” was never so empty as in Rwanda. Most Rwandans know this and will suffer the consequences of the world’s inaction for generations. I understand that Rwandans’ relationship with the genocide is complex, and the appalling absence of intervention by the rest of the world in 1994 compounded existing mistrust of western governments and foreigners. These feelings are neither uniform nor universal, and are seldom publicly shown, but I have learned to expect them. I must accept them as a subtext of teaching and be cautious not to project my own biases onto them. I must also understand that there is more to being an outsider than nationality, skin tone, and language. Some experiences are not transferable, and perhaps they are best left that way.
