We’ve been affectionately calling Kigali paradise for the past month or so, as our trip there grew closer and closer. Compared to Uganda, especially Gulu and the rest of northern Uganda, development there is insane. The roads are paved, and paved well. There are lines painted on the roads and traffic lights – before Rwanda, I had only seen one traffic light in my entire time in Uganda, and that was in downtown Kampala, near Parliament. Boda boda drivers not only wear helmets and vests to mark them as official drivers, but also are required to provide a helmet for their riders. In Uganda, you’re lucky if your driver has a helmet for himself, and there’s never one for the rider.
Additionally, there wasn’t one grass roof to be seen, in the capital city or out. Even small, rural houses had tin or tile roofs, and houses were rarely even made of wood, but usually stone or brick, if you were wealthier. There was ten times the amount of cars in Rwanda as there were in Uganda, and a public transportation system.
Rwanda itself is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, hands down beating Rome and Paris. It’s called the Land of a Thousand Hills, and once you cross the border, it’s easy to see why. There is not a single plain to be seen through almost the entire country. And these aren’t little hills either – most could probably pass as small mountains. Roads and houses are built right into the hillside, and anyplace flat, especially in the north, is manmade. Some of the hillsides are covered with a forest of tall trees; others look like massive tortoise shells, a patchwork of fields and grasses in different shades of green and brown.
Kigali itself could pass for a small American city. There are skyscrapers – actual skyscrapers! – and electricity that almost never goes out. Restaurants serve gourmet food, things I could never hope to find in Uganda are in every supermarket, and people here are so used to white people I can walk around town without getting stared at (though, the marriage proposals received served as a reminder I wasn’t actually in a Western city). Here more than anywhere the amount of money that was poured into Rwanda after the 1994 genocide is hugely apparent.
It was this genocide that I was in Rwanda to study, though, and with only about a week and a half to try and cram in an entire country’s worth of history, we got to work as soon as we arrived. What became apparent almost immediately was that, even though no one talks about their Hutu and Tutsi identities, the Tutsi are still the ruling class in Rwanda. It was easy to tell most of our lecturers had been Tutsi by the way they spoke (using the words ‘we’ to describe victims or survivors of the genocide, and ‘they’ to describe Hutu perpetrators were the most obvious and giveaways). We already knew, from visiting and talking with Rwandan refugees in Nakivale, that many Hutu are afraid to return to Rwanda for fear of being arrested and charged with crimes in the Gacaca Courts, a system used solely to judge and sentence accused genocide perpetrators.
All of this might seem like obvious results of the horrific events of 1994, and you would be right. However, nobody talks about the thousands of Hutu who were also slaughtered during the genocide. The genocide in Rwanda is almost always called ‘The 1994 Genocide of the Tutsis’. The Hutu who refused to participate in the genocide, or the moderates who spoke out against the killing, were killed right alongside the Tutsi citizens.
Additionally, an even bigger dilemma that hasn’t been addressed is the atrocities committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army, led by Paul Kagame, during their advance into the country from Uganda in 1994. Reading almost any book, visiting any museum, or listening to any speaker, and they would have you think the RPF/A launched their offensive to stop the killings and save the Tutsi singlehandedly. However, as they approached Kigali, they met both Tutsi and Hutu alike fleeing the violence, and like the President’s Guard and the Interahamwe, demanded to see identity cards before offering protection. More often than not, any Hutus they discovered were murdered.
Paul Kagame is now president of Rwanda. The development apparent in the country is a direct result of his direction of funds in the country. He even instituted an activity called Umuganda, a national, mandatory volunteer effort that takes places the last Saturday of every month, in order to keep cities like Kigali clean and to establish a sense of pride and ownership of the wellbeing of the country within the citizenry. Umuganda works; most people are happy, even proud, to participate in a national effort on Rwanda’s behalf. Kagame’s administration also sees little to no corruption; it is clear why Rwanda is viewed as an African success story.
However, not all is as it appears. Kagame maintains a tight grip on Rwanda. It is not a clear example of authoritarian rule, but it is something that becomes abundantly clear to the careful observer. Whereas in Uganda, I could walk down the street, if I wanted, criticizing Museveni and talking about the LRA at the top of my voice, that sort of thing is ill advised in Rwanda, to say the least. People who have spoken out against Kagame have been subsequently arrested on one charge or another soon after, if they don’t disappear altogether. We couldn’t even ask questions directly to our lecturuers that might be construed as critical of the administration or sympathetic to people other than the Tutsi where the genocide is concerned. It would seem the trade off for an uncorrupt regime is one without basic freedoms of speech or press. I couldn’t tell you which I preferred (though, going back to Uganda has actually been a relief, which probably says something).
But, back to the genocide. I expected these two weeks to be rough. Studying the 22-year war in northern Uganda was something I could process slowly over the course of a month and a half. In Rwanda, I had to deal with trauma that took place in three months and killed just as many people, if not more, than in Uganda, and had to do it in eleven days. We had to cram a lot in.
We went to three different genocide memorials in one day. The first we went to was an actual genocide museum, with murals and placards with names and information about the leaders and victims of the genocide. There were machetes and other weapons that had been used in the killing on display. There was actual footage playing of people being hacked to death, and videos of survivors telling their stories in graphic detail.
At the end of the museum tour, there were a series of rooms we could enter and explore. One was a room full of photos of people who had been killed or were missing and presumed dead from the genocide, with their names written in black Sharpie underneath. Some of the photos had flowers or small figurines standing next to them, as though they were actual graves. There was more footage playing in this room of people talking about the killing of their family members. Another room had a rectangular glass display case with the skulls of genocide victims displayed inside.
After the museum, our group drove to two other memorials in churches where actual mass killings took place. Here, we found rows and rows and rows of human skulls and bones from the people who had been killed there. In the corners were huge piles of clothes, worn by the people as they had been killed. It was an emotionally intense day, to say the least. It was incredibly difficult to try and remain detached when confronted with such a sheer amount of human brutality.
We had to try and make Rwanda fun. It wasn’t so hard, considering Rwanda had so much to offer a bunch of American kids who hadn’t seen almost anything Western in two months. We ate pizza, Chinese, and burgers all the time. We drank coffee in cafés, and found bars that actually mixed drinks. We went hiking in the hills, and took city buses downtown to sightsee and shop.
One night, we bought tickets to attend a charity party hosted by a Rwandan youth hostel. When we showed up, it was a massive gathering of Western youth dancing to Western music. I’ve never been so relieved to hear Justin Bieber in my life – finally, songs that I recognized, that I could dance to!
Another night, we visited the Hotel des Milles Collines, AKA Hotel Rwanda. It was easy to hang out there, since it didn’t look anything like the hotel in the movie, which a group of us had watched only a few nights before, but it was still eerie to sit back by the pool with drinks and live music.
Our last two days in Rwanda, we travelled to two very different homes – the first, the traditional palace of the ethnic king, last residing in the 1950s, and then to the mansion of Juvenal Habyarimana, the man who presided as president of Rwanda in the years preceding the genocide.
At the palace, we saw three different royal homes. The first was the traditional palace for the king, a massive grass hut, larger than any I’ve ever seen. Inside, the floor was covered with thick woven mats and ceremonial clay pots, as well as traditional weapons and decorative furs. Behind the king’s hut were two smaller huts, one for the king’s milk and one for the king’s beer (which, if you ask me, is pure awesomeness). Behind these three huts was a corral for the king’s cows. These cows, with huge, curving horns, were a status symbol. They were never slaughtered for meat, their milk never drank, and were only paraded around in costumes or bedecked in flowers on special occasions.
The last of the ethnic kings, though, didn’t live in any such hut. Instead, as he converted to Christianity, the Belgians built him a sprawling and beautiful modern home, with bathrooms, fireplaces, and even a garage for his Volkswagon. Apparently, this wasn’t enough for the last king. In the 1950s, he commissioned an even larger home on the next hill, where we traveled next. Unfortunately, he died the year after it was completed, and was never able to move in. It’s now an art museum, housing paintings, sculptures, and wooden carvings all revolving around the common motif of peace.
Habyarimana’s home was even more luxurious than the two homes of the king. It’s a huge, sprawling estate, complete with tennis courts, an in ground swimming pool, and a slightly smaller in ground pool for Habyarimana’s massive pet snake. Inside, the decadence was even more apparent – sparkling chandeliers, carved wooden furniture and paneling, even a coffee table made from an elephant, with preserved elephant feet serving as the feet of the table.
Habyarimana’s paranoia was astounding, and apparent in his home (and I mean, hey – when you’re the face, the voice, and the leader of the outright murder of over a million people, no wonder). Built into the stairs leading to the second floor were a series of alarms that would go off when someone would climb them. Each succeeding step triggered a different sound, so the president would be able to tell how far the intruder had progressed. In his bathroom, he kept a filing cabinet full of money in all different currencies so any intruder would be distracted long enough to allow him to escape. And, in his sons’ room, he had a series of secret doors, two of which opened into small closets that were used to store arms and a third that hid a staircase that led to the third floor of the house – the only staircase that led there. The third floor was large enough for Habyarimana, his wife, and all of his children to all live comfortably for a very long time. There were two bathrooms, several bedrooms, a sitting room, and even a roof that served as a chapel. Habyarimana even kept a traditional African doctor on staff, and it was on this floor he resided.
The final part of our tour led us back outside and across the yard. From a guardpost, we were able to see the remnants of the plane that had carried Habyarimana back from peace negotiations with the RPF/A in 1994. As it approached Kigali International Airport on the night of April 6, 1994, just down the road from the presidential home, it was shot from the sky. Habyarimana, the president of Burundi, and several members of the Rwandan cabinet died in the crash. The genocide started only a few hours later. To this day, the identity of who shot down the president’s plane remains a mystery. Hutu extremists in 1994 claimed it was the RPF/A, and a French court, on evidence of radio transmissions, has convicted Kagame of participating. But, the French aided the Hutu regime that incited the genocide, providing arms and military training. Meanwhile, the hate radio station that broadcast the names and addresses Tutsi, and was one of the biggest tool the genocide perpetrators had in killing, broadcast only days before the death of the president that something very big was going to happen, and then it would be time for ‘the work’ to begin. I don’t believe the world will ever know the truth.
I can say all of this because I’m back in Gulu now, beginning my research, and I’m not going to get kicked out of the country for it (though, seriously, how cool would that be?). We got back on Friday, and we’re all settled in our guesthouse, nice and cozy. It’s hard to believe I’ll only be here another month. The good news, though, is that I’ll be able to post more now that I’m settled in one place. Look for me!
