Memorial

The 1994 genocide in Rwanda has been well documented and it is hard to find a parallel event which matched its scale and brutality in a relatively short period of time. What I hadn’t appreciated until visiting the Genocide Memorial museum in Kigali, although it seems an obvious precondition now, was the level of political fervour and hate-mongering that had built up for years if not decades, and the lower level incidents that had been rearing their ugly heads for the same length of time.

The Memorial is very moving and a must-see location for anyone visiting Rwanda. Outside there are these mass graves in the museum’s grounds. The whole thing is a very sombre experience. It’s incredible to think the Rwandan genocide was only 28 years ago, well within most our lifetimes. I was 11 in mid-1994, skipping about daily life, doing whatever inane things 11-year old boys do, whilst several thousand miles away 11-year old Tutsi boys or boys belonging to Hutu families the militia deemed moderate, had to watch family members being sliced to death with machetes, before being slaughtered themselves.

Evening arrival at Kigali Airport for the flight back to Dar es Salaam, whereupon we were informed it had been cancelled. The choice was wait for 48 hours for the same route, or attempt to transfer to a circuitous itinerary involving Addis Ababa, which would take about six times longer.

I was more or less alone in opting for the very delayed but neater option involving least faff so promptly found myself, at the airline’s expense, back at the main conference hotel in Kigali, now largely desolate with most participants having made their exit. An unexpected annex to the Kigali visit.