Kigali Memorial Centre

Lying some 3kms from the city centre and built upon mass graves from the 1994 genocide in the small suburb of Kisozi is the Kigali Memorial Centre. Some 250,000 bodies lie within the grounds.

It can’t be too easy to attempt to recreate the horrors of the genocide but the centre succeeds in doing just that. Set up with the assistance of the Aegis Trust, i spend a harrowing afternoon engrossed in all the exhibits on display.

The ground floor looks solely at the events in Rwanda through pre-colonialism, colonisation by the Germans and Belgiums, the events leading up to the genocide and the aftermath and subsequent trials of its perpe trators. The cold and calculating manipulation and dehumanisation of people never fails to shock. The assorted weaponry from guns and machetes through to simple clubs with nails and spikes, and not least the brutal rape and torture prior to death is starkly shown to the point of suffocation to the visitor.

the main perpetrators of the genocide were the Interahamwe militia, many of them just teenagers - trained and funded by the French government

If this was not enough the exhibition continues upstairs, where they endeavour to to compare and contextualize genocide with exhibitions ranging from the German extermination of the Herero in Namibia in 1904 and the subsequent European holocaust, but also Pol Pot’s regime of terror in Cambodia and the Turks in Armenia. Further sections exhibit bones, skulls and clothes from Tutsi victims, as well as thousand of photographs of the deceased. A montage of videos of survivors are shown who are clearly trying (and failing) to comprehend and make sense of the ordeal they have borne witness to.

skulls of just a few of the 800,000 to 1,000,000 victims in three months of madness

Finally for good measure the exhibition looks at a handful of photographs of the many thousands of young children who were systematically slaughtered in the 1994 atrocities. After two hours of such an onslaught i come out of the centre for a much needed cigarette, deeply emotional and upset from the degradation i have just witnessed. I am totally ashamed to be part of a species that can inflict such horror to each other.

in memorium

As Cambridge Liz wisely once said to me “the more i know humans, the more i appreciate animals”.

This Memorial Centre is a must visit not just to travellists in Rwanda, but to the Rwandans themselves. Lest we forget!

Admission costs RFr 5,000 for overseas students and a taxi motor costs RFr700 to/from the city centre.