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I know it’s a bit of a blogging cliché to apologise for not having posted so long, but I imagine our silence might need a little explanation. I blame our visit to the Kigali (genocide) Memorial Centre last Monday, because I left knowing that I would have to write something about it, and dreading it at the same time.

I tend to be weary of such museums or centres – in South Africa I suppose the same goes for places like the Apartheid Museum and Robben Island, although the latter has less of a curated feel. It’s difficult not to imagine the curators chuckling over clever symbolism, reducing history to select images, captions and cardboard cut-outs.

But, like its South African counterparts, the Kigali Memorial Centre manages to overcome its obvious brick-and-mortar limitations to represent the flesh-and-blood historical reality.

I don’t think anyone can visit the centre and remain unaffected by the scale of the tragedy (travesty!) Rwanda suffered in 1994. Almost a million people were murdered in the 100 days of complete mayhem that swept the country from April that year (the death toll rises considerably when you take into account the run-up to the event itself, and its aftermath).

The sheer scale of the massacre is difficult to comprehend – over 250 000 victims are buried at the site of the centre itself (the title of the post was copied from a sign outside the main buildings). Keep in mind that the country’s total population at the time must have been between 7 and 8 million.

Images of the dead are powerful enough – bodies strewn across roads, in churches and schools, left for days but with machete cuts still visible in the decaying flesh. No-one was spared, and those who weren’t targeted were burdened with resisting and risking their own lives, or the guilt of having done nothing to prevent the needless deaths.

At the same time, you have to consider the warning signs prior to the actual genocide, the international community’s refusal to heed these warnings, and their subsequent hesitation to act once all hell broke loose. Some of these deaths, at the very least, were preventable.

There is a lot of material in the museum to bring the madness of this sequence of events home. To some, it’s the so-called “Children’s room” that makes the genocide real – pictures of children who died in the genocide are displayed alongside descriptions of their favourite foods, what made them laugh, what their last words were and how they died.

To me, it was the story of one of the interviewed survivors. Video footage of their testimony is included throughout the memorial, talking about their experiences, about forgiveness, and about moving on with their lives.

The man, a little boy at the time of the genocide, told the story of his last few days with his mother. Food was scarce as the scale of the genocide escalated, so some families managed to bribe the Interahamwe (“Those who kill together”, the Hutu militia responsible for most of the killing) with food.

As a result, his mom only had beans in the house, and (since she knew he didn’t like beans) she scrounged around to find a small piece of passion fruit to soften the blow. That was the last meal he had with his mother, he said, giving in to his tears. To this day, he can’t bring himself to eat passion fruit.

It was such a simple story, but one that communicated the ridiculousness of the whole situation – families torn apart, trying to maintain some sense of normalcy in the face of what was just complete madness and horror. To think that his mother would still worry about her son’s eating habits just before her murder made it seem all the more unexpected and incomprehensible.

Maybe it doesn’t make a lot of sense writing it here, and I am sorry if it gets a bit too personal, but I think it’s worth talking about and describing, if only to make the genocide more real to more people. After all, the centre was built with the belief that remembering and spreading the word is probably the only way to prevent something like this from happening again.

Let me just point out that I don’t equate what happened in Rwanda to apartheid in South Africa, nor do I think curators are evil – the descriptions and comparisons I include here are meant to illustrate my own discomfort with the idea of representing human tragedy in a museum. I have great respect for the curators who do so successfully!

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