Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'There are a quarter of a million victims buried here,' he explained. 'We can collect only
a fraction of their names.'
Inside, the centre was black, the only lights those illuminating the laminate display
boards recounting individual stories of those horrific months. Boston and I followed
Amani from room to room. In one, banks of bleached skulls glared at us, each one of them
wearing the wounds from bullets and machetes. In the next room, nothing but thigh bones,
stacked from floor to ceiling. With only our footsteps to break the silence, I slowly un-
derstood that the graves we had seen outside were only a fraction of what the Memorial
Centre could show, and even this was only a fraction of the people who lost their lives
in 1994. Death on a scale like this is hard to absorb, even when you are faced with it so
starkly.
In the next room thousands of portraits stared at us. These, Amani told us, were the im-
ages of those who had died: men, women, and children. Most of them were smiling. These
were photographs taken at Christenings, weddings and graduations. Some were classic
portraits, gazing to one side like posed Victorian sittings, while others were taken from
afar, in the background an object of pride - a new car, a motorbike, a young couple in front
of their first home. As I stared, I saw Boston focusing on a picture of a mother who held
her new-born children, and a man in a shiny, black suit.
All of them were dead.
Beside me, Amani was unusually still. 'Just walk around,' he said. 'See it for
yourselves.'
A video, which showed indescribable scenes of murder on a constant loop, masked
Amani's quiet exit. It wasn't until an hour later, shell-shocked by what we had seen, that
Boston and I emerged from the Memorial Centre, back into the glorious sunshine, to find
him sitting on a bench beneath the eucalyptus trees. He looked emotionless, and the only
noise was that of cicadas.
That night, I got to thinking about this first staging post of our journey. If ever there was a
place to give life to the cliché of Africa's dark heart, it is here in Kigali. I sat in the incon-
gruous surroundings of an Indian restaurant and, as I looked into the eyes of the waiter, the
diners, and the people who passed outside, I understood in a way I hadn't before that every
one of them had been there. Every one of them was a survivor or a perpetrator, locked
together in uneasy accommodation. There is a sense in which Kigali and Rwanda have
worked a miracle in forging a way ahead. Coercion, recounting, memorialising, and even a
kind of ritualised forgetting, have all been components of that - but the scars remain fresh,
twenty years on, and in some way they'll remain fresh for the twenty to come.
