Feature
- Mwaramutse! Summer Research in Rwanda
- Children from a village near Lake Kivu in Kibuye teach the author a song in Kinyarwanda. Photo: Kathryn Berndtson
The two months that I spent in Rwanda this summer (with brief visits to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda) were the most powerful and wonderful of my life.
After finagling my way through three international airports while hauling 65 kilograms over the permitted baggage allowance—I was transporting two suitcases full of school supplies and a laptop to a youth center there—I arrived in Kigali. As the plane landed, I couldn't look out the window. I was so afraid of what I had gotten myself into that I honestly couldn't bring myself to look out. What on earth did I think I was doing? “Please, dear God,” I prayed, “let someone speak English.”
As I left the airport I was swept head on into the madness of Kigali.
Dusk in Kigali is especially beautiful despite—or more likely because of—its choking pollution. The twilight has a warm pink-orange color that enhances the redness of the African dirt, and the city is already so colorful that evening makes it almost surreal. At night in Kigali the lights on the dark hillsides fade into the thousands of stars dotting the black sky.
While doing my research I lived in a Catholic hostel run by strict nuns—each room replete with a crucifix—for $6 a night. Although it did not have much hot water in its communal showers, the people were very nice, the roaches were small, and I was within walking distance to the city center. By the end of my time there, I could navigate by myself if I were careful.
Rwanda has countless genocide memorials. Because my research assesses the role of empathy in genocide reconciliation, I was eager to see the ways in which physical monuments catalyze empathy and contribute to the reconciliation process. Some memorials are merely crosses marking the sites of unthinkable brutality. Others are churches filled with the bones of victims, just as their killers had left them.
- Rwanda Youth Healing Center, Ruhango, Rwanda, summer 2005. The author, center, is pictured here with youths who are survivors of the April 1994 Rwandan genocide.
The memorial in Kigali represents a particular interpretation of Rwandan history, but its one-sidedness does not reduce its emotional force. Once within it I thought I was doing fine, but when the memorial's message changed from sleek exhibits on colonial manipulation to a large screen with a video depicting child after child crying in pain, with massive scars along their heads, I just stood there. And the moment I saw one particular crying child I began to cry also. I was there for perhaps twenty seconds before a Rwandan friend said something in Kinyarwanda to my interpreter, and he said, “Let's move on.” We continued, and again we moved to less visceral exhibits: Kangura/Radio Télévision Libre de Mille Collines (RTLM) propaganda; the disturbing ideology of Gregoire Kabiyanda in the 1960s; Juvénal Habyarimana's rise to power in 1973; the failure of the United Nations (UN); and heroic stories that were classified as acts of love more than bravery.
I thought we had reached the exhibit's end, but there was much more. I walked into a circular room with graceful curved statues surrounding quotes in Kinyarwanda such as, “There is no humanity without forgiveness, there is no forgiveness without justice, but there is no justice without humanity.” Adjoining that main area I encountered rooms full of thousands of photographs of the people who were murdered: smiling, happy, alive, loved. These photographs were donated by surviving family members. This room, which was the most powerful empathetic stimulant I have seen in any memorial, assaulted my conscience. Each photograph imbues a moment (serene, happy, triumphant, and wise) in the life of a person (full, complex, interesting, and human)—and there are thousands. Each one represents the aching loss of the person who donated it.
To look at each photograph, to repeat the loss, even ten times, would have incapacitated anyone, but to feel the room spinning around me with thousands of pictures was too much. My first glance sent me into a steady stream of tears and badly masked irregular breathing. I can only remember two of the three I looked at—a husband and wife, standing in a driveway, arm in arm, and, worst of all, an ebullient girl, missing some baby teeth, hair in pigtails, smiling in her little pink shirt—before my interpreter took me by the arm and led me out saying we would come back another day.
I also had the chance to visit two of the most inaccessible genocide memorial sites in Rwanda near a town called Nyamata. Both were churches. During the first bouts of ethnic violence in 1959 and 1962 churches were havens to which people fled and found refuge. In 1994, however, no place was sacred. The churches' roofs were splattered with tiny holes from the debris caused by grenades. In the dusty, dark silence of these places, tiny rays of light pierced through the ceilings, which looked like they had been painted with faux stars. In the church called Ntarama, nothing has been touched. Beneath the pews, which are boards on cinder blocks, the bones and belongings of the 5,000 people who were massacred in that tiny space littered the floor. One sees a toothbrush, a tiny Velcro shoe, a femur. The only way to pass through the church is to balance carefully along the pews, knowing that one stumble might mean falling onto the bones of a human being. The windows have been hacked through with axes. Outside there is a banner that reads in Kinyarwanda: “If you had known that I was like you, you would not have killed me.”
The hardest part of my experience to describe is what happened during my interviews. One Hutu informant who insisted on meeting me in a darkened hotel room said that owing to the sensitivity of the information that he was divulging, his life would be at stake if anyone found out his name. The interviews I conducted with prisoners were so interesting that I felt almost guilty for being able to spend my days in these meetings. I spoke with prisoners in Gitarama and Kigali. There is hardly any way for me to illustrate adequately what that was like. Interviewing in the prisons was the only way that I could begin to understand how the genocide happened. I spent most of my days baffled and sickened by the idea, but when I spoke with these people I found transitory moments of clarity, thinking, “Oh, so that is how that happened.” Most of the stories were brutal and terrible, but not only for what they did to their victims. Many of these people were very young—19, 20, 21-years old—during the genocide, and many with whom I had spoken had hidden Tutsis in their homes while rampant murder occurred outside.
One man told me he had confessed to killing two people. I asked him who they were and if he knew them. “The first one,” he said, “I did not plan to kill. I was on my way to a funeral for an elderly Hutu woman in my ‘cell’ (the smallest unit of a community in Rwandan society) with the cell's sector head and several other people from my village when a child came up to us and said he knew where someone was hiding inyenzis (‘cockroaches’). We went to the house and found a man farming in his yard. The sector head asked, ‘Are you hiding inyenzi in this house?’ He said no, but the sector head said he was going to look himself. He found a woman inside and ordered the man who hid her to kill her, which was a common order during the genocide. The man refused, saying, ‘I cannot kill someone I have hidden in my house.’ At that point the sector head turned to me and said, ‘If you do not kill her, I will kill you,’ and handed me a club.”
He killed the woman. “I was not a human being,” he told me.
When I asked him who the other person was whom he had killed he said that it was a child, not even ten years old. “Why did you kill a child?” I asked.
He explained to me that the child was the younger brother of his elder brother's wife. He was Hutu, but his brother had married a Tutsi. They were hiding the boy, his mother, and the grandmother in the house when the Interahamwe arrived, attacking and killing everyone but the child. When they left, the child was almost dead, writhing in pain on the ground. The elder brother of this man called to him and said, “We cannot take him to the hospital. We cannot treat him. He is only suffering. You must kill him.” He handed him a hoe.
- A church in Ntarama, Rwanda, where 5,000 people were massacred in 1994.
I have failed to mention many interesting and beautiful things about my experience in Rwanda; in an attempt to provide a more complete picture, here is a disjointed, random list: the ragged children with distended bellies in Kibuye who taught us a song in Kinyarwanda on a pier on Lake Kivu (“Nane bazungo! Abarachi muraho! Hobe hobe hobe hobe!”); the way that being white gave me the instantaneous and undeserved status of a rock star—in Rwanda I was followed by throngs of children crying out “Muzungu! Muzungu!” (“European” in Kinyarwanda), or “Monique!” “Monique!” in the Congo (the Swahili rendering of Monuc, the French acronym for the UN mission there); the dry season ending with a tumultuous thunderbolt and deafening rain; and the brightness of women's fabric and fruit against the sleek, gray streets. The time I spent with the Association des Elèves et Etudiants Rescapés du Génocide (the survivor's club at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology) was greatly rewarding and relieving. They assuaged my fears about abusing their generosity, told me they were grateful for the fact that I already knew a lot about the genocide, and thanked me for being “trés gentile.”
I spent two of the most challenging and rewarding months in my life in Rwanda last summer, and I am so grateful to have had the experience.
Kathryn Berndtson (special concentration in Applied Social Ethics), a Weatherhead Center Undergraduate Associate and Rogers Family Research Fellow, is investigating the consequences of failed empathy in the Rwandan genocide and the process of re-humanization in reconciliation.