This past Friday I took most of the day off from work and went to Butare, a city about two hours south of Kigali. Although it was once thought that Butare would become the capital of Rwanda, it is very different from Kigali today. It’s still the third largest city in Rwanda, but it has the feeling of an old western town. There is one dusty, main road through town which is lined with tired-looking shops and hotels and restaurants. However, it’s still home to a number of attractions, including the National University of Rwanda, the National Museum of Rwanda and several other universities.
When we arrived in Butare, we first visited the National Museum, which has an impressive collection of artifacts and displays about the history and culture of Rwanda. The museum has several main rooms that showcase historical, artistic, archaeological and ethnographic aspects of Rwanda. The first room focuses on geographic aspects of the country – topography, soil, vegetation, climate, etc. The next rooms feature displays about economic and social activities such as agriculture, herding, hunting, fishing, basketry, pottery and wood carving. In the middle of the museum, there is a room that features a traditional Rwandan hut and shows ways of living and social organization. Clothing, adornment and recreational activities are on display in the next room, and the final room presents information about prehistoric Rwanda. Interestingly, though perhaps appropriately, there is very little about modern history in Rwanda. The six or seven most recent leaders of the country are shown in a small display with a very small description of each, but the descriptions were kept to the basic facts, presumably lest they stir up any controversy. (Note: I didn't take any pictures but I found this one online.)
Outside the museum, there is a small botanical garden, and as we were walking through it, we stumbled across a crafts training school. Supposedly, the school is free of charge to Rwandans who are interesting in learning various crafts such as basketry, metal work, pottery and paper. They come to the school for a certain period of time during which they learn a particular craft, and then they return to their homes to practice their new skills. It was very interesting to see.
We ate lunch in a tiny restaurant that was basically on a side alley off the main road in town – a typical Rwandan lunch of rice, beans, banana, isombe (cassava leaves), meat and sauce.
After lunch, we decided we should visit Murambi, one of Rwanda’s starkest genocide memorials. In mid-April of 1994, approximately 60,000 people gathered in and around a technical school on this hill to seek safety. Many were sent there by the bishop and mayor of the town, who told them they would find protection from French soldiers stationed there. Instead, electricity and water were cut off once they were there and after three days the soldiers ‘disappeared.’ The interhamwe then attacked and, within four days, all of those on the hill except four had been killed. Most of the bodies were thrown into mass graves on the hill so that today the old school buildings are surrounded by mounds containing tens of thousands of bodies. What makes this particular memorial so chilling, however, is that over 1,800 of the bodies have been exhumed and are now on display inside the rooms of the school. Room after room is filled with tables that display the preserved bodies of those who were killed there. Some rooms contain only adults; some contain only children and infants; some contain a combination of both, with mothers still holding their youngest children. We were guided from room to room by two guides, both of whom were survivors of the genocide and one of whom had survived the attack at Murambi. In each room, the scene was a horrific reminder of the events that had taken place. Skulls were cracked; ribs were crushed; bodies were contorted and broken. After seeing the rooms of bodies, we walked through a larger room that was filled with the clothes that were stripped from those who were killed. They created another powerful scene being stacked on bookshelves along the walls and hanging on clotheslines that stretched across the room. Afterwards we walked around the outside of the buildings, past the mass graves, and finally back to the entrance building. I didn’t take any pictures, but I did find a website that has an extensive collection of images from the classrooms if you’re interested: http://homepage.mac.com/stevesimonphoto/Murambi%20Memorial/index.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment