It could be argued that there is really only one important thing to see in this city, and it had been bothering me for awhile that I had not seen it. I’m talking about the Kigali Genocide Memorial, opened in 2004 in Gisozi, on the site of a mass grave of 250,000 people.*
So I went to Gisozi this afternoon; it gave me the opportunity to familiarize myself with a new minibus line (for Kinamba and Université Libre de Kigali). I actually got off the minibus early because I thought I was at the right place, but ended up walking for about fifteen minutes instead. This was fine: the truth is, I could have walked the whole distance from town in a half-hour or so, and I do enjoy exploring on foot.
“Town” is on one hill, and Gisozi (which means “Hill”) on another, to its north. To get between the two, one descends into a valley and then reascends. There is a small river to cross, with a sizable basin filled with papyrus swamps on either side; this is interesting to see, given that beyond the marsh on both sides is city.
The memorial is not far up the hill in Gisozi. It is maintained by the Aegis Trust, a British N.G.O. that developed it, I believe, in conjunction with the Kigali City Council. It includes a series of exhibits, a gravesite, an archive and a café.
The exhibits are dedicated primarily to telling the story of the Genocide. Having read many different versions of this story, it is always interesting to see how another entity tells it. Very little can possibly be objective, and several pieces—ethnicity in precolonial Rwanda, the role of the Belgians and the final casualty count, among others—are especially sticky.
Perhaps I am prescribing more than I should, but what I read—a rendition that told of harmony prior to colonization, an ethnic hierarchy largely invented by colonists and a death-toll of over a million—seems consistent with a government that wants to emphasize the scale of the tragedy and promote unity among its people. I cannot say there is another version of the story that is better, or that I would rather have seen, but it is thought-provoking to see a story that so necessarily displays the interests of the storyteller.
It was well told, too: there were lots of images and several films. I have a lot of respect for the decision to put the English and French translations in small print below the main Kinyarwanda text. It is a little bit annoying for the foreigners who make up a substantial portion of the Memorial’s visitors, but it shows respect for the Rwandans for whom the center was built.
After the storytelling section, there were some other exhibits. There was a room with some bones and personal effects of victims. There was a room with hundreds of photographs of victims, put up by family members. There were some quotes in big plaques on the walls. There was a section with displays about other genocides.
I have to say that, having read so much about this already, I was not as upset as I thought I would be. I knew what was coming, so to speak, and my mind had prepared itself; the photographs were often not easy to look at, but somehow the bones did not hugely affect me.
One part was really hard, though. The second floor had a Children’s Room, which I thought going in would try to describe genocide in a way accessible to children. No. It was about young victims of the Genocide; there were big pictures on the wall of the kids, happy and alive, accompanied by plaques that gave parents’ descriptions of them, along with their cause of death. Reading about a toddler who liked pasta, ran around rambunctiously and played with her sister, and was smashed against a wall until dead, that was very powerful.
In the evening, for a change of pace, I met friends in the city to see a movie. At the time my guidebook was printed, there were no movie theaters in Kigali—except a couple that would play whatever movie you brought, provided their speakers were working. In the past couple of months, though, one has opened in the Kigali City Tower, and it is functionally like an American theater (except smaller and cheaper).
We saw “Man of Steel”; the screen was smaller than most in theaters back home, but the tickets were Fr. 4,000 ($6) including 3-D glasses, so I couldn’t complain. I can complain about the film, though, so I will now digress a couple of paragraphs to share my thoughts:
I have to give the filmmakers a little bit of credit: What they are working with is a story of a superhero who cannot be harmed except by the remains of his former home planet. There are only so many times Lex Luthor can sabotage some Kryptonite and actually pose a threat to Superman, so we have to resort to ever more absurd plots.
The premise for this film was a military coup on Krypton, just before its demise, whose perpetrators were imprisoned in space but freed by the planet’s destruction. They then spent years gathering arms from Krypton’s former colonies before tracking down its only other living citizen: Clark Kent, living in America, in whose genes was encoded the blueprint for rebuilding Krypton—which former Emperor Zod** wanted to do on earth. And they had this thing called a world-engine that was going to alter earth to make it more like Krypton.
Huh?
As contrived as it was, the plot was remarkably free of substance! A solid majority of the film was taken up by sequence after bewildering sequence in which Superman fought against his Kryptonian pursuers, never accomplishing anything (of course, because none of them could be harmed) except collateral damage. The scale kept rising, and the scale of the carnage was outrageous. (Multiple office-buildings collapsed spectacularly; it actually seemed in poor taste for the film to show those events, which inevitably would have caused loss of life on a huge scale, while maintaining the feel of a fun action movie.) Additionally, the dialogue was often bad and there was not much room for character development between all of the explosions.
By the way, I remain confused about how the conscience of dead Jor-El was housed in multiple Kryptonian ships, how he was able to walk around like a person there and interact with people, how the plan he proposed to reimprison the invaders made any sense at all, and how Superman ultimately killed the final villain. I don’t feel much of a desire to know, either.
The film had its redeeming features. I liked the lead actors, and I thought the story of Superman’s childhood was told well—that is, with subtlety and emotion, two factors missing from the rest of it!
* I am not quite clear on how those 250,000 people got to the location, or how precise the number is: that number far exceeds the number of Tutsis who could have been living in Kigali before 1994, and even by the most liberal casualty estimates represents a huge proportion of the total dead. Though I know there are many human remains there, I wonder whether it might also be a symbolic grave for the rest.
** Not to be confused with Emperor Zog, who actually ruled Albania in the early 20th century
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