The Memorial and My Feet

I spent the afternoon at the Kigali genocide memorial center here in Kigali. The center was built by the Aegis Trust, a British Foundation devoted to genocide education.

It is a neat building, well-designed and carefully landscaped by Rwandan standards. It consists of an outdoor memorial with an anonymous mass grave (with over 250,000 bodies), a garden, and two floors of indoor exhibits.

The bottom floors is a circular exposition of the historical conditions before, during, and after the Rwandan genocide of 1994, arranged in a circular set of rooms through which visitors proceed chronologically.

The format mirrors Yad Vashem (the Israeli Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem) and the United States Holocaust Museum.

The floor contains an exhibit on other genocides: the Armenian, Herero, Holocaust, Cambodian, and Balkan ethnic cleansing. Darfur is not mentioned in the entire memorial, which I found a bit surprising.

All in all, it is an impressively rendered display. I found the following particularly fascinating:

-A quotation as I entered: "if you knew me and you really knew yourself, you would not have killed me." I was unclear whose words these were.

-The historical note that the Belgian division of the population into Hutus or Tutsis in 1932 hinged on whether or not a person had 10 or more cows. If you had the cows, you were a Tutsi, if not- a Hutu. Apparently, in pre-colonial times the two groups weren't ethnic or racially-associated, but purely sub-clan socioeconomic labels. One could switch groups through "upward mobility."

Finally, the children's memorial was fascinating: individual profiles of kids slaughtered by the interhamwe (state-sponsored militias of armed Hutu that did most of the killing)

I copied down one child's profile.

Aurore Kirezi, Age 2
Favorite Drink: Cow's Milk
Favorite Game: Hide-and-Seek, with her big brother.
Behaviour: Very talkative
Cause of death: burnt alive at the Gikonda Chapel.

Afterwards, I sat in the cafe outside and had a Rwandan meal of rice, cooked squash, and beef soup, with avocado and a steaming thermos of coffee. For some reason, the genocide makes me hungry, like after a Jewish funeral.

I decided to walk part of the way home, rather than take a moto the entire way (motorcycle taxi, very cheap, fast, and somewhat dangerous).

On the way, I saw a sign advertising haircuts, manicures, and pedicures. On a whim, I asked for prices... the men outside were very amused, and told me it was 500 rwf for a pedicure (90 cents).

They also threw in a free manicure. I took a moto the rest of the way home.