As I mentioned earlier, I am here to study the
genocide that happened in Rwanda in 1994.
So I just want to warn folks that the stuff I write about in this blog
(particularly this entry) may sometimes not be super pleasant to read and the
pictures I post might be gruesome/hard to look at. However, I hope that this blog, as well as my
work to come in the future, can help people living a continent away to
understand that what happened in a tiny African country back in 1994 was
ATROCIOUS. I hope to make it REAL for
people. Understandable. Relevant.
To encourage a feeling of some sort of global responsibility for fellow
humans, regardless of nationality, race, or religion, so that there can be a
global effort to STOP these things from happening again. The fact that massive human rights
abuses—some on the scale of genocide, or close to it—are still happening as we
speak is just… crazy. Many of us simply
file them away as “news stories,” completely not understanding the human
experience of living those news
stories. So I might try to make it
personal. I believe that if we can take
the time to really think about what it’s like for people living in these dire
situations—to relate them to our lives and personalize them so we can try to
better understand—then maybe we’ll understand that we have to do something.
That was a little ranty.
Sorry haha.
So here’s a little background on Rwanda, terribly pared down
and simplified. During the craze to
colonize Africa, Belgium eventually ended up in control of Rwanda. They defined the country’s boundaries in a
way that split pre-existing groupings of people apart, and then they expanded
and aggravated a divide between the poorer agriculturalists and the richer
pastoralists. While once an area living
in harmony, Rwanda became radically divided between the favored Tutsis and the
inferior Hutus, based on ridiculous beliefs of early race politics and Belgium’s
desire to maintain control as the colonial minority. Thus the Hutu and Tutsi divide became
normalized—becoming assumed “natural” identities—as authoritative institutions
continued to promote this divide as “natural” and “biological.”
Ok. So essentially,
the Hutu/Tutsi divide is a colonial construct.
The two groups have continually fought for power over the decades—rather
than deconstructing this colonial emphasis on Hutu and Tutsi in favor of
creating an inclusive, national identity, the two groups simply switch places
over time. The Tutsis were in power
while the Hutus were oppressed, then the oppressed rose up to gain power in
order to oppress their oppressors.
Vicious cycle.
The violence of 1994 particularly caught the media’s
attention as being especially gruesome and horrific. 800,000 lives within 100 days. Over decades of institutionalized hatred and
cyclical counter-violence, the Rwandan government implemented a mass extermination
of its “enemies,” the Tutsis. An
alarming number of average, everyday citizens ended up brutally hacking their
neighbors to death with machetes—a process we’re here to contextualize,
historicize, and ultimately understand.
We have to think of it not as random crazies who one day grabbed
machetes and began a reckless frenzy of murder.
These are your neighbors, your “average, everyday, normal” neighbors,
reacting to decades of institutionalized hatred.
This past week, we visited three genocide memorials to
really make it real. It’s so different
reading and studying a situation than actually getting a glimpse into what it
was like. We started at the Kigali
Genocide Memorial which has a museum and a burial with 250,000 bodies. It was a brutal push into the whole situation
we’re studying. There was a room
entirely full of pictures, just a sampling of the faces that are no more. The hardest exhibit was the children’s
room. It had large photos of maybe 10
children and each picture had a plaque that said their age, favorite food, what
they wanted to be when they grow up, and how they died in ’94. Looking up at those innocent, smiling, soft
faces, reading their ages: 9 yrs, 2 yrs, 9 mos, and then reading “stabbed in
eyes and head.” “Hacked to death by
machete.” “Smashed against a wall.” How can one “undo” the natural instinct of
seeing a baby and wanting to pick him up, hold him tight, cradle him? How can one physically bring one’s muscles to
take a baby’s head and smash it against a wall?
We visited two churches as well, called Ntarama and Nyamata,
which have been preserved as memorials.
Usually taken as holy, sacred, untouchable places, churches housed many
frightened people fleeing from the killings.
They thought they would be protected, yet instead they were targeted,
they were places where the killers could efficiently murder large groups of
“cockroaches” (what they called Tutsis).
Inside the churches, we were appalled to see every available space—each
wooden pew, the altar space, the walls, even parts of the floor—piled with
clothes of the victims. A belt. A torn shirt.A tiny pair of pants. Remnants of the humanity lost. Piled in glass cases were bones. Whole bundles of leg bones, hip bones,
skulls. Underground, behind one of the churches,
we climbed down into musky darkness, where a guide’s flashlight eliminated
shelf after shelf, stack after stack, of skulls. Rows of two gaping black holes where seeing
eyes had once been—two after two after two after two….Visible, ragged holes in
the milky skulls, where a club had hacked it away, and distinct evidence of
machete slices. It was overwhelming. We had a huge processing session afterward to
debrief but seeing all of that makes it so real. My dear host family had to experience this. I can’t imagine having to deal with a tragedy
this huge and how that can affect such a beautiful, loving family.
It's a bad picture from the internet, but to give an idea of the clothes stacked
literally everywhere in Ntarama Church.
This is at Nyamata.
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