Murambi: Phil

I’ve been working at the Murambi Genocide Memorial now for the past two weeks, concentrating on the project of installing the exhibition inside the main building, not thinking much about what’s out behind, where hundreds of people’s preserved bodies lie in haunted, living death on white-painted racks in the student dormitory blocks.

As a location, Murambi is breathtakingly beautiful, a tidy if somewhat dilapidated array of classrooms, dormitories and washrooms situated on the grassy crest of a red dirt ridge that falls away on both sides to lushly gardened bottom lands and freshwater creek and beyond which rise the steeply cultivated and densely populated hills that hold this place in a close, but in no way comfortable, embrace.

With all its beauty, a sense of peace is lacking and the sound of nearby children playing is like the screech of chalk on a blackboard, edging against the knowledge of a contested history, a story soaked like the gravel of Murambi in blood. On the ridge road above, diesels beat through montane forest to Cyangugu and across the Congo border to Bukavu.

Yesterday the dead came to greet us.

We were leaving Murambi after work, beginning the long walk up the dirt road to Gikongoro through the rough hamlet of Kabeza (Place of the Beautiful People) when a white district truck approached bearing the remains of three individuals recently unearthed in neighbouring villages, apparently victims of the genocide and requiring the proper registration, certification and respectful burial in the Memorial’s mass grave.

Jumping into the cab we drove back through the gate, where the contents of the three sacks were poured out onto the ground to be documented with photographs and verified as human. Yes, sir, three bags full: one a pile of dusty brown, rotting bones - broken skull and jaw bone wrapped in the victim’s own decaying coat; the second a jumble of leg, arm and collar bones, skull missing a front tooth and staring out from its torn cardboard box; the third scarcely a full complement, but sure as its cranium a once-human being.

Since our initial visit last spring when Maggie and I were introduced to Murambi’s history and grim legacy of preserved bodies, I’d not visited the dormitories where they lie. I had in the interim read and re-read survivor and perpetrator testimonies, watched videos, looked through photo after photo of the genocide and agonized over every word and phrase of the Murambi story. So just after sunset and before leaving for the night I walked the length of the compound and made my first brief visit to the dormitories in six months. While I found all the doors closed and locked for the night, a couple of tarps covering the back windows were loose and I was able to glimpse inside.

I was startled, not so much by the sight of the bodies, as by the entire act and scene of which I was a part, becoming at once interloper, shocked observer and bereaved family. Drawing back the corner of the tarp was an act of trespass yet also of discovery, throwing the last light of day across those flattened, frozen forms, like opening a tomb to reveal a startling truth.