The memorial itself is a white building situated on the northeast side of Kigali, on the side of a hill with a good view of the city to the south. Around it, there are some very nice gardens. If you're strolling through the gardens before the rest of the memorial first, however, one might wonder why there are these big concrete slabs without any greenery in the gardens. That's because they are mass graves, with over 20,000 bodies inside.
Inside, you walk in a circle, reading about the history of the Hutus and the Tutsis, that really it wasn't a racial differentiation but a movable class differentiation: tutsis were the upper class cattle owners and hutus were the lower class farmers. However, should a Hutu acquire more cows, then they became a Tutsi. There was already a separate clan system based off of families anyway, but when the Belgians came in, they jumped on the Hutu and Tutsi thing. People who owned more than 10 cows were considered Tutsi, and they were placed in positions of power. The ever-increasingly powerful Catholic church jumped on this Hamitic theory that the Hutus were descendants of Ham and the Tutsis were descendants of Shem through King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. According to Genesis, Ham was made to be a servant to Shem, so that made it sound like an awesome idea to have the Semitic Tutsis be rulers over the Hamitic Hutus.
Way to go, colonialism.
I'll skip over the rest of the history and say that some of the more moving parts of the memorial are when you walk into one room, and it's just photos of people who were massacred. Then, there's another room where they have skulls, femurs, ribs, etc. gathered together, some of them with clear machete marks on them.
Then there is a special section where they talk about genocides that happened elsewhere, Cambodia, Armenia, the Balkans, the Holocaust...but they also talked about one that I didn't realize had happened in Namibia under German rule in 1904.
Then, the most moving part, where they show pictures of children and then tell how old they were, a special characteristic about them (daddy's girl, loved animals, good at school), their favorite foods, and then how they died. Most of them were hacked with machetes, but one girl whose picture showed her with her birthday cake and candle had been stabbed through her eyes and head. Another very chubby happy baby was smashed against a wall.
Yeah, I know, this is a debbie-downer post. Sorry. I wish I could come up with some sort of deep and spiritually enlightened thing to say about it, but I can't. I just have to wonder what it takes for an entire society to get up and say, "let's kill off an entire group of people." I guess I should read "The Path to Collective Madness" so I can perhaps stop wondering.
But it does also make me wonder what I would do in a similar situation. Say I wasn't a target/victim, but I was just a member of the populace committing atrocities, would I put my family and myself in danger by helping the victims? I would like to think so...but then, I've never had my house overrun by men with machetes, saying "give me your cockroaches or we will kill you too." Let's just hope that's a test no person on earth should ever have to face again.
There was a little section that talked about the different rescuers. One guy was a Muslim who took 30 or so people in and hid them, quoting a verse from the Talmud and the Quran: "if you have saved one life it is as if you have saved the world." Another person had built a series of trenches on his property because he was scared of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the Tutsi led organization that was trying to overthrow the Hutu Government and establish a democracy in Rwanda. However, when he noticed that the current government was starting to slay Tutsis, he hid 14 people in the trenches, lay wood over them, then banana leaves, and then quickly planted sweet potatoes on top. They stayed there for the entire genocide. His wife and daughter cooked and gave food to the people hidden there.
Another woman was known to participate in some sort of ancestor-worshipping cult, and she hid people in the cave where the ancestors spirits were honored. When the Interahamwe (genocidaires) came in to search it, she told them that the spirits would take over the interahamwe if they defiled her cave, so they left her alone and the Tutsis hidden inside survived.
I thought those stories were just awesome. I hope that if something like that were to happen, I could be nearly as clever as the last two individuals, and as sincere as the Muslim man.
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