nyanzato get out of Kigali, you climb. starting in the thick of city traffic, the fog of diesel and motorcycle exhaust, you climb into suburbs with less traffic but steeper hills, turn a couple of roundabouts with the bigger trucks and police cars wheeling at your side, stop for some water or the rare orange near what seems to be the top, then climb again with bike taxis and private cars further up, Kigali spreading like a postcard snap below, evangelical megachurches pass in the building, half-finished homes and hotels for the rich, and just as you are actually really reaching the top, legs rubber and lungs fire, a sign on the right says genocide memorial.
any normal person would ignore it, would give in to the animal cry for rest and air, but this was what i'd climbed the hill for in the first place: to get in touch further with the genocide visiting memorials outside Kigali town. i hadn't known of this one--i was headed for Ntarama and Nyamata, churches that witnessed massacres, now dedicated to their memory. i hadn't heard of Nyanza, but since i was here anyway, i turned and did the unthinkable: kept climbing, lungs afire and legs vulcanizing, up a steeper gravel road to a pink building at the top. i couldn't have gone ten more feet when i made it to their nicely paved sidewalk, nicely paved on a blessed decline, and coasted in.
a man out front connected me, still huffing, with a man inside who was "in charge of memory and documentation," who took me to the front, where i saw three long, low white-tiled platforms, headed with a wall of names like a tombstone.
he explained that this had been the site of a massacre early in the genocide, where people who had taken refuge with the Beglian UN peacekeeping force were slaughtered. the Belgians, he said, had made a temporary base at a nearby vocational school, and Tutsi people had gone there knowing they'd be safe. within a few days, however, the order came from above for the Belgians to relocate to a new site. when they began packing up, the people taking refuge there told them not to leave, as the killers knew where they were, that they would surely kill everyone once the UN had gone, or to take them along, but the Belgians refused.
the day after they left, the Interahamwe came and, not wanting to kill them close to international eyes, herded them up the hill where we stood, Nyanza, and in the space of three hours killed the better part of 5,000 people, who were buried under the mass graves i saw. around 7:30, they left off for the day, saying they'd come in the morning to check if anyone was still alive under all the bodies.
that night, the RPF, who had a small contingent in Kigali from the former peace process, came and rescued all the living, and took them back for treatment. the rest, the dead, were buried there after the genocide was over.
after he'd told me the story, i continued asking him questions, and finally asked him to tell me his own story. he did. it was horrific. i could see he'd told it before, but that the memory still pained him. at the end of it, maybe 15 minutes later, i was amazed that the apparently well-balanced, educated person here talking with me was the same who had lived through what i'd just heard.
i wish i could tell you his story, but he said without me having heard all the details, he'd rather i didn't. so i am respecting his wishes. but it is overwhelming to know millions of the people alive here today have similar stories, are living with similar ghosts, with one or two of what were families of ten or more. i find myself searching for it in the eyes of the older people i meet, the ones who must have known what was going on and taken sides, wondering if i can see there wisdom gained, or faith, or lingering horror or shock... actually, i don't know what i'm looking for. the thing is too horrible to be imagined, too big to be looked for: it's everywhere, and yet you can't see it, can't imagine what it have been and still be like for those who lived through it. you want something simple to grasp on to, like the man's story. i guess that's what i'm looking for today: something comprehensible about the genocide, not the overwhelming numbers and political forces talked about in at the Kigali Memorial yesterday, but something a bit more human, something i can grasp. maybe such a thing as genocide is beyond grasping, but like other mysteries you still feel you have to try, to establish a personal relationship somehow. the man had taken me a step closer to that, though their simple memorial of 5,000 souls, just 1/50th of the number buried at the memorial yesterday, was still beyond me.
i thanked him, for the explanation and more so his story, then got on my bike and rode. downhill.
the third pushit wasn't all downhill, but the next six kilometers or so were, a long gorgeous grade (punishing on the way back) down into swampy flats with a river looping through, the road passing by a series of bridges to the far side, another hill.
somewhere on the very bottom slopes of that hill, i may have exchanged greetings with a young boy and his brother started; they started running after me. we passed through a small village on the far side of the flats, and a ways father up, the boys still running, i exchanged some banter in three or more languages with a troupe of young men walking to work with machetes over their shoulder (echoing queasily the pictures of young men being trained for genocide, the Interahamwe, walking in groups with machetes or wood clubs over their shoulders). the front one started jogging to keep up with me, and the others followed suit.
it was uphill, so i was riding slowly, and they only had to jog, but what i expected to leave off in a minute or so kept going. up and up we climbed, me sweating under the weight of all my gear, them jogging and joking but sweating as well in the late morning sun, the kids still tagging along on my side of the road.
i kept peddling, they kept jogging, all of us now working too hard for words.
normally people running along with me like that is kind of annoying, especially when they are right behind me--part of the mzungu spotlight i am always riding in. this time something different happened: the climb got easier.
i physically felt like someone was pushing from behind. the hill hadn't let up any, and i looked to see if the kids were pushing my bike, and they weren't, but at moments now it didn't feel uphill at all. and i guess that is the magic of a push: doing it together makes it less work. i wondered again, as i sometimes do, about invisible fields of energy, and if many people doing something together doesn't have its own momentum, making it easier for all, something like the reason migrating birds fly in Vs. it's easier riding in a group of bicycles, too, than riding solo...
whatever the reason, the top was a long ways up, but didn't seem that hard to reach. the jogging troupe--still jogging after that whole hill!--didn't look that tired, but i knew they must be, to have run ten minutes or more carrying machetes in the hot sun. the downhill is where it gets easy for bikes, but i didn't want to just leave them behind, so i rode the brakes as we started to descend. even so, the pace picked up (by this time there was another biker in the group as well), and the front man, then all the guys, started running, sprinting to keep up.
they were doing all this just for me? just for the novelty of seeing a white guy on a bike? amazing.
i rode the brakes with them for awhile, then couldn't resist (and wanted to give them a reason to stop), so i let off and started really rolling down the far side of the hill, me and the other biker outstripping the pack, waving and swerving all the way out of sight.
would that happen in america? between complete strangers? never. knowing that, and feeling how much easier their running had made my own climb of the hill, i coasted the whole other side grinning, grateful for the push, and--genocide still on my mind--for the resiliency of the human spirit.
Rwandai can't help thinking the genocide happened in the wrong place. people are so cheery, so naturally ready to laugh and chat with you, it seems a contradiction that this very culture, this very person you are joking with, lived through 100 days of horror just 15 years ago. that he or she lost friends and family and was forced to choose, those who had a choice, between compassion and death, between ethnic hatred and life. others had no choice, and simply had to run and hide, or be cut down, or both.
and yet africa, Rwanda, is a place of cheery, bright-natured people: laidback, ready to chat, ready to enjoy every moment of life, no matter the circumstances.
could these same people have been murderers and murdered?
unbelievable as it is, the answer is yes. and it's a contradiction, a disjunct i see every time i approach a genocide memorial, or meet eyes with someone who's there. people are not hurt to be reminded of it--i don't think they can forget--but the first instant of happily greeting a mzungu is in the next instant overshadowed by knowledge of where i'm going, what i'm looking for, and a very un-african seriousness comes over their face, and then we have nothing to say. it is the one thing that absolutely cannot be laughed about, in a culture that otherwise wants to enjoy everything, and me focusing on that one thing puts me in a strange relationship with the people who both want to laugh with me, and want me to see and know about what happened here. there is no sense of invasion, no sense of Rwandans begrudging you entrance to these places: they are somber, but also pleased that you have come, that you have taken interest in the genocide. they want the world to know, want what happened to them never to happen again, so painful as it is they are pleased to show you the memorials, open to talking about what went on.
and i see that this genocide, and the ethnic wound it opened, was a tragedy for more than simply the senseless killing: it was a tragedy in putting something forever somber and painful in the otherwise jolly hearts of these people, an unforgettable tragedy in the lives of people who otherwise want to be merry everyday, to enjoy things as they come. Rwandans hold in their hearts the very brightest and the darkest that humans can be, and the whole beautiful, ravaged country holds that contradiction, lives it out in everyday life.
it is terrible, and fascinating. i want to understand this place deeper, this collision of the best and worst of the human spirit--not just to visit a few places in a few days, but to live and learn how to see Rwanda and its past as Rwandans do. its something we as humans need to do. i hope today is another step in that.
ntaramai come at last to the sign for Ntarama Genocide Memorial (the signs are not in English--throughout all the memorials i've been to, the signs are mainly in Kinyarwanda: they are first of all for the Rwandan people--but 'Jenosida' is easy to understand), and ride up a dusty road past obvious signs of foreign aid: the Nelson Mandela Peace Village (closed for the holidays), 25 houses built by Red Cross for child-headed families, an unlabeled school with a couple older white people sitting around a table farther off. i wonder if all of the Rwandan countryside looks like this, or if organizations have funded projects on this particular road because they know there is a steady stream of tourists coming to see the memorial, and they're out to maximize publicity. or if this is another expression of the guilt we as the international community feel for having stood back and let the genocide happen.
the church itself has been enclosed and engardened, covered with a giant, independent weather shelter, surrounded by a brick wall and guardhouse, and on the grounds have been added a concrete walls of names--mostly blank--a simple place to pray, and some lovely flower gardens. it is all well made and maintained; even as i walk in two or three women are cleaning the compound. i wonder how much the money spent here in memorial could have done to prevent the genocide from happened, have visions in my head of free food being handed out with leaflets on ethnic understanding and unity, with flyers debunking the entire Hutu/Tutsi division as a creation of long-gone colonial powers, a tool being used simply for power.
i have avoided the main display, wandering around the site with my thoughts. there are some other tourists here, and i want the place to be empty when i go in, want my thoughts to myself without the interruption of someone else communicating their experience of it on top of mine.
so when they have gone back to look at the flower garden, i step in the front door of the church. directly in front of me is a metal rack, four tiers high from floor to ceiling, of bones. of human skulls and bones.
i have never seen something like this, have seen only a few dead bodies in my lifetime, and a skeleton or two hung up in classrooms. these are real: these are the skulls of people murdered here, skulls with holes, with cracks, skulls missing whole sections, skulls caved in by the force of the blows they took.
i start to walk, walk slowly down the shelf of skulls, looking at each, seeing behind them, wrapped around them like ghost flesh the faces of the people these must have been, inevitably imagining at the same time their death, the blow that must have made this hole, the one that shattered that skull, wondering what happened to those still in good condition. i see before me the death of hundreds of people, see skulls too small to have been other than children, babies, often in pieces. above, below, more racks, more skulls, more bones. they are laid there with no words, no pictures, no explanation. none is needed.
i stand a long time, looking at those bones.
on the other side of the church, at the end of long rows of empty benches, is the pulpit, draped with a cloth in memorial purple and white, embroidered with the words: IF YOU HAD KNOWN YOURSELF, IF YOU HAD KNOWN ME, YOU WOULDN'T HAVE KILLED ME. and on both sides of church, lining the walls like silent witnesses, the stained, ragged clothes of the victims, floor to ceiling.
the effect was stunning: you almost felt those people, those owners and makers of the skulls behind you, were still here, were forever watching over the place they'd died. and the sheer number of the clothes, the way they bulged a foot or more from the wall on their racks, extras hung on ceiling rafters, all colors but all tinged with a rust you hope is dust but know, on looking under the top layer, is not--all there as witnesses, silent voices saying "this really happened, to us, right here. look. learn. never forget."
you can't.
i paid my respects at the altar outside, took a few healing minutes with the flowers and another walk around the place, the broken-down kitchen and the forgotten stumps in the rear of the grounds, wondering what this place had been like before the massacre, knowing it in spirit from all the other african churches i have been to, simple brick buildings for worship and connection to the lord above. this one has become something different, possibly still a place for prayer, but now a center for humans to connect with themselves, to see the horror we are capable of, and to leave carrying that knowledge, for good.
bread and cheesehorrors of Ntarama or no, my stomach is indefatiguable. i'd barely got to the main road when i knew i needed to eat lunch, so i found a quiet spot a ways from the main road, shaded by eucalyptus and bordered by a little path going farther back in the woods. there i sat to eat my lunch: bread, cheese (6 days old by then), carrots, an orange. it was my first orange, aside from the seedy tangerines you find in Uganda, in more than a year, and reminded me of home, of mass-produced mass-stickered florida oranges on refrigerated shelves in grocery stores, not that flavorful but what we'used to.
the stars of the show, though, were the bread and cheese. i'm always reading about people in olden times on long trips carrying loaves of bread and wheels of hard cheese, and now i see why: they keep, and they go lovely together: soft, dry carbohydrate-rich bread, flavorful, smooth, protein-rich fatty cheese. the carrots were a nice touch but unneeded, and i ate reflecting on how every bicycle lunch could be just bread and cheese and i'd be content. i let the food and breeze and trees mild the horror i'd just seen a bit, then got back on the road for Nyamata.
nyamatadidn't turn out to be as far as i'd thought, just another five kilometers or so down the road. the original church was structurally bigger and nicer than Ntarama, now walled off with a high steel fence and ringed with the purple and white pennants of memorial.
i thought i was ready for what i'd see, since i'd been through Ntarama, but the inside of the church was again overwhelming: no skulls, no bones, no banners, no racks, just the wide semi-circle of the church benches, piled high with the clothes of the dead.
they were too many, actually: all around the pulpit, too, they were piled two feet deep, and in the back of the church, and around the sides, in every free space except the narrow aisles, were piled all manner of discarded clothes, feet deep and stained the rust color i knew too well from Ntarama. there, they had been hung on the walls, something like a display. here, they were laid thick on top of the benches, like people piled on people, gathered in silent prayer. it was unearthly. i felt so strongly the presence of those murdered people that i couldn't at first enter, and just stood in the doorway looking at the wide, empty room, at the leavings of 10,000 souls lost to genocide.
a bit father forward Mother Mary stood on a shelf above the crowd, tall, beautiful white face inclined downward, hands clasped in prayer. she was too symbolic to interpret: God weeping for the people here; symbol of the ineffective Western hand-wringing that let the genocide go on; Mother of Mercy stuck forever there praying for the souls of the departed; another aspect of the white colonial powers that lay at the root of the genocide, but did little to prevent it. i wondered how she had looked as the killing went on, as the grenades had been gone off in the crowded room, their shrapnel cutting the holes still letting in light from the ceiling, the killers swarming in through the broken metal door, machetes and clubs and knives swinging. wondered how they could have killed so many and left her, wondered if she, if all thought of god and divine justice, had been forgotten, or feared, or ignored in the work at hand. the box with the sacrements was broken, and on the altar lay several rusting metal implements, surely the tools of the massacre: a machete, a plastic-handled knife, a steel file with a spiked end. on the pews, the congregation was silent.
there were stairs down at the rear of the room, and i descended into a white-tiled underground chamber, in teh center of which was another rack of skulls, this one with some small artifacts, identity books still bearing the place to mark ethnicity--hutu - tutsi - twa - naturalized--though time or blood had wiped out the actual marks, wiped out ethnicity along with name, age, education, everything. in the bottom of the glass case, a single coffin. i was later told this was for a woman raped, then impaled from the bottom and left to die.
behind the church were the long rectangular platforms i'd come to recognize as mass graves, white with purple crosses made in the tiling. there were windows open on the end, and i bent to look in. a woman raking the grass on the other side of the compound motioned for me to go in. her motions weren't suggestive, giving me the option of going in, she was insisting i enter. so i walked to the middle, where there was a door, and went down.
this crypt was darker than the one in the church, was made of simple bricks, held metal racks of four or five shelves from floor to ceiling. they were piled with skulls, skulls and bones. if the rack at Ntarama had been overwhelming, this was more so, was ten or twenty times the remains of people seen there, sunk down in the earth with only a small rectangle of sunlight coming through the far window.
i walked slowly down the passage, bones piled high on either side, fimirs and arm bones and hips literally stacked three feet deep, skulls in single layers on other shelves, each single skull of those thousands a human life, a life lost to genocide.
a quote at the Kigali Memorial Centre had said 'he who saves one life saves the world entire.' how many worlds were lost here?
i got to the end, turned, and sat down with my back to the wall, facing down the long underground corridor, bones to my left and skulls to my right, just sat there with them for a time, not wanting to run from the spectacle.
i don't know if my relationship to death is healthy or fragile. i know it is something we fear in the West, something we deny whenever possible, with the extremes of life support and the cosmetics of the morgue. death here was undeniable, and the reasons for their deaths senseless, simple brutality in the name of an invented ethnic division, a line drawn in the sand of common humanity. some skin, like paper, still clung to a few of the skulls. with my hands, i felt my own skull inside my head, knowing it to be the same shape, the same stuff, eventually to be the same dry bone somewhere, life gone. but that i, subject to no dangerous racial or ethnic discrimination, and born into wealth these people had never known, and most of all not murdered before my time, have opportunities and chances in life these people never had, is that reason to feel guilty? is it reason to weep?
i don't know if my relationship to death is healthy, is a real acceptance of it like we rarely have in the West, or something fragile, just a veneer over the fear of my own coming end. there in the crypt i didn't cry, wasn't holding back tears. the display yesterday of the people who had stood up and risked their own lives to save others in the midst of the brutality, that had brought me to instant tears, will still if i think about it long. but the piles of bones around me, they were just bones, and i sat with them a long time, thinking of the people they had been, thinking of the lives they must have led, and how they'd died. i held someone's fimir in my hand for a time, held it to my own leg and saw that he or she must have been around my size, that the bone inside my leg must be about that same size and shape. i wondered at the difference between that dead thing and this living thing, me. wondered at all the hundreds or thousands of living legs those bones used to be, just those very bones on that lowest shelf of that one crypt i was sitting in, another crypt to either side.
i walked down into those too, saw the coffins full of remains, struck my head hard enough on one of them to wonder if i was going to join them, walked up again into the sunlight and sat on an empty cement flower pot at the rear of the church, looking at the graves and the grounds.
to my left, on the other side of the church fence, some men were talking, hefting red lumps that i took to be bricks. they were shirtless, and even from a distance i could see how well-defined their muscles were, how strong and healthy they must have been. i imagined the bones inside them too, thought of how so many of those who died here must have once been like these, innocent people discussing this or that on a weekday afternoon, laughing now and throwing down the dirt they had been holding, walking to the left up the road. would still be.
what is life?
what is death?
what does it mean to be alive, seeing all of these dead around us? knowing we too will die, in our own way, some day? are the genocide victims reasons to despair of this whole project of being human, or reasons to celebrate, to embrace our life and humanity, in all its capacity for good and evil?
the day before, in a cafeteria back in Kigali, i was reading a book, in which the author says:
"Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the kinds of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them [...] You don't ask what the world means, you enjoy it. You don't ask what you
mean, you enjoy yourself; or at least, so you do when you are up to snuff.But to enjoy the world means something more than mere good health and good spirits; for this world, as we all now surely know, is horrendous. "All life," said the Buddha, "is sorrowful"; and so, indeed, it is. Life consuming life: that is the essence of its being, which is forever a becoming. "The world," said the Buddha, "is an ever-burning fire." And so it is. And that is what one has to affirm, with a yea! a dance! a knowing, solemn, stately dance of the mystic bliss beyond pain" [1]His words echo Neiztche's in
The Joyful Wisdom, and an idea i've had for a long time. sorrow, death, they are parts of life, something to be celebrated as part of life. the food we eat, we must enjoy it knowing it died for us, must love living because we know it is hemmed on either side by death, that our very existence is luck and mystery.
but can this, too, this genocide and its legacy, also be confirmed with a yea! and a dance!? may be so. maybe this a real test of us as humans, of our ability to accept ourselves. or maybe i haven't yet understood what i've seen, understood what genocide means to human life. i think it needs a big, strong human heart to affirm this genocide, and to live with it in sorrowful joy. i guess that's what the Rwandans are doing, or trying to do. may they, and may we who know and swear never to forget, succeed.
[1] Myths To Live By, Joseph Campbell. Penguin Compass, 1972. pp. 102-103
affirming lifeon the way home, in the very heat of the day, somewhere on the slopes of the longest climb, out of breath and out of water and dying for both, i stop at the place i see that might sell water.
it doesn't.
there is no physical room for disappointment or despair or the extended conversation the shopkeeper appears to want to have. i remount and keep climbing, lips parched and mouth dry.
i come to a more level place with a bar clearly selling beer. good enough. i stop, order the biggest beer and biggest water they have, wait in agony as the kid goes somewhere else to fetch it, pay more than he originally asked for because he messed up his English numbers, and sit with a sigh and a long pull of both on a chair in front.
genocide or no, beer is good after a long, hot ride. so is just sitting down. genocide or no, it feels good to be alive.
after i've rehydrated and rested enough to feel human, even, i get out my computer to try and sort out my thoughts of the day's sights. the shopkeep, a teenage boy, is there in a flash to watch what i'm doing. it doesn't take long before eight or more teenage boys are in all stages of peering and craning over my shoulders to try to read what i'm writing, none better than broken in Engish, but one trying to read aloud anyway.
i give up: there's no way i can write like that, and it's rude to ignore eight people's interest in my little computer so i can type unintelligibly in the black and white of Notepad. so i turn on the webcam, shock them taking photos and videos of themselves, then when the novelty's worn off open up pictures of home.
they crowd around as i point out my brothers, my dad, my mom and sister, the food we're eating, the house i lived in, our cars, a rock concert, all the normal details of american life that are so foreign and interesting to them, and we start to talk about my family. i am painfully aware they may have lost many of their own, when they were barely young enough to understand. we talk about cars, about women (looking through pictures of Okinawa, many of which featured me with an ex-girlfriend), about all the universally interesting facets of life.
and me sinking that beer, those kids craning over my shoulder to see the little pictures on the little screen, it was great. that was life, that was me and Rwanda getting to know each other over more than a tragedy in their past. i thought, yeah, maybe i can accept that history as part of life, maybe we can affirm it even as we move past, pushed anew to appreciation of the good and simple things in life.
i hope so.
i thanked them, gave them my e-mail address, shook hands and got back on the bike. i felt human again, but there was still the last, long, muscle-vulcanizing climb into Kigali before i could rest, still the sun beating down from the west. i set to it with gusto, knowing it is the difficult things that make the good things good in life.
