May 13, 2010. On the road to Murambi the car moves slowly through the bustling Kigali district of Nyambugogo, drops down to cross a wide river valley filled with papyrus marshlands, travels slowly up a long hillside of cultivated plots and growing commuter development. As we travel west to Gitarama, south to Butare, and west again to Gikongoro, there are people everywhere and I contemplate what carry.
On their heads, backpacks and duffle bags, green washbasins and blue buckets overflowing with sweet potatoes and cassava, yellow jerry cans dripping water, bundles of tied vegetation, stacks of eucalyptus poles. Laptops, sturdy brown woven baskets, schoolbooks. Children in bare feet or flip-flops, school uniforms or torn shorts and shirts. Women in bright patterned fabrics, babies tied to their backs with a wraparound cloth that binds breasts. City men in well fitting black pants and ironed shirts and pointy black shoes, carrying the need to look smart; hundreds of men on rural roads in work clothes carrying shovels and pickaxes.
On the road to Murambi the car holds five: myself, Phil, three staff from the memorial centre. As we drive through Gitarama, Honore, a thin young man with glasses and an intelligent face says, I lived in a village near here until I was ten. Phil makes conversation, what is Gitarama is noted for? He’s thinking bananas, or a technical school or the quality of the potatoes. Honore answers, extremists.
Our driver, Yves, 29, has a quick energy. Head of the centre’s documentation and archiving project, he made his story public, dark words on white pages and so I know he carries the knowledge of how his mother died, forced face down and shot in the back of the head. How his father died, shot repeatedly and left in agony.
On the road to Murambi, rolling hills, fields of bananas, pineapple plantations, hillsides of eucalyptus gobbling the water, then further south, rice paddies in the valley bottoms. Good asphalt roads edged at midday with streams of schoolchildren in uniforms of green plaid or dull beige or bright blue going to school or coming to school. Flowing in two directions, under the new system of double-shifting. Near Gikongoro the hills higher and steeper. And now Murambi comes into view across a valley, a low hilltop on which sprawls a brick building.
Yves drives through an open gate, up a gravel road with slightly overgrown lawn spreading on both sides, and parks in front of the building. On the steps of this former school, green hills spreading in all directions, Freddy, director of the Kigali Memorial Centre, tells us what happened at Murambi. In short, forty to fifty thousand Tutsi corralled here. Water cut off, no food. A night of slaughter on April 21, 1994.
Freddy and his sister, only survivors of a family of eight, have also publicly recorded their stories. Freddy carries the night his mother was murdered, the memory of covering her with dirt in a shallow grave. Now his mother’s bones are amongst the ancestors I visit every day at work.
What do the locals carry? The ones who never visit the Murambi memorial site yet live on the slopes below and around this hilltop, who do not say what happened was wrong. Do they tell their children untruths, borrowing from deniers, that these are not genocide victims but the victims of the army that stopped the genocide? Do they keep their children from playing in the same fields where the French soldiers played volleyball next to open mass graves? How do they keep their children from being curious about what is inside the twenty-four classrooms, in brick rows behind the main building? How do they manage the weight of refusing to see?
One man unburdens, Emmanuel, a guide, tells us. Emmanuel is young with a shaved head, dressed in an immaculate blue-gray suit, carefully knotted dark tie over a white shirt. He says quietly, “This man had participated in the massacre. He came to tell what he knew. He had to speak.”
Emmanuel is grateful; there are so few survivors that the whole story is not known and there is a need to know what this man knows. The man has confessed at the gacaca (community) courts, is trying to make amends by speaking truth. But gacaca is complicated. If you tell too much you might be promoted to a higher class of genocidaire, and so stay in prison forever, but if you tell too little you may also stay in prison forever as the court may not believe you are telling the truth. For perpetrators, truth is often qualified and strategic, and so I ask Emmanuel if he believes the man. He does not hesitate. He says firmly, “Yes.” He feels truth, I think, and so I have to believe with him.
We are at Murambi because it is now a memorial site. The Aegis Trust, which was instrumental in creating the centre where I work, was also taxed with developing the Murambi memorial. But it was a big job in a remote place and much was left unfinished, including an exhibit that was never opened to the public because of the need for revisions. The National Commission For The Fight Against Genocide has now assumed responsibility for the site but Aegis/Kigali Memorial Centre are contracted to revise and complete the exhibit, hopefully for the end of the annual commemoration period which is in early July. Enter Phil, who is now providing design consulting and project management.
We spend a couple of hours reviewing the existing panels one by one, noting where new text will go, where new images are needed, which panels need redoing. I invited myself along because there was room in the car, but I enjoy participating in the discussion and am happy to be the consultant’s assistant, happy to see how everyone is animated and engaged and collectively grappling with thorny problems, how the young guys come to life. They carry the survivor’s mission of witness and never again.
We debate the ‘nights of horror section.” How much horror to show? There’s agreement that some of the photos are impossible for a public exhibit and should be replaced. Maybe compress this section and make more room for other sections? Or keep this entire wall as a place that communicates the horror that shouldn’t be minimized? Finally Yves says, “There’s enough horror here. This is not all of it.”
Emmanuel takes Phil and myself behind the main building to the 24 rooms. Each room has slatted wooden tables and on the tables are human remains, preserved in lime for evidence. Big skeletons, male and female, baby skeletons. Skeletons with their feet poignantly crossed, with arms flung up to protect heads or curled under a skull, holding. Severed limbs. A jaw frozen in a wide scream. Legs stretched out, knees pulled up. Threads of clothing.
There is a painful humanity here, an animation still in the bones and I have a strong and visceral impulse to rest a hand on a thigh, hold a bony finger, but I am fearful of being disrespectful. So I caress them in my mind as if it was not too late for comfort, as if I could make up for a lonely death, abandoned by the world to a fate that even other survivors can barely grasp.
We visit only a few rooms. Emmanuel says, “See, that one was crying. See, there the machete went through the skull.” Emmanuel says, “See, the heat was so intense in the pits into which people were thrown that the ones in the middle were preserved.” I don’t know if I want Emmanuel, with his mourning timbre and matter-of-fact words, to say more or to fall into silence, to come closer or leave me alone. He has one hell of a job, but he says it makes him strong. He’s saying, see, I need your witness, I need to speak out loud, I need to keep hold of truth, I need you to share this with me. See.
It is dusk when we climb into the car and leave Murambi. On the roads it is dark, and the people going home flash into colour as the headlights hit them. I think about what you do with what you carry, what you do with what you know.
You put your story in a book so that you do not carry it alone.
We Survived: 18 personal testimonies (Quill Press/Aegis Books, UK, 2006)
Yves: I worked with Aegis Trust to establish the Kigali Memorial Centre because it’s ours; we need to be the one’s doing it. If I don’t do it, who else will? Not everyone is capable of doing it. It’s very sad spending all your looking into the lives of people who were killed and looking at their picture. But I do it and I do it with all my strength because it needs to be done so that the people who want them to be forgotten will have failed.
Freddy: It’s difficult to forgive, but it’s not impossible, because the few genocide survivors cannot develop Rwanda by themselves. We all need to combine our energy to develop the country. But I think it’s better for those who committed crimes to start asking for forgiveness…they should show us that they are truly sorry. Then things could proceed.
No comments:
Post a Comment