Kwibuka

Visited the Genocide Memorial Museum in Kigali today. It’s the 5^th time I’ve visited, and it is as hard to visit as ever. 

Reading the narrative, the background and the personal stories; seeing the photos, the videos and the artefacts; sitting in a room that has hundreds of photos of individuals who were brutally murdered, or that has glass cabinets full of skulls and bones representing some of the thousands who were killed – it hits you hard, and rightly so. This sort of visit should never be easy. As soon as it becomes that for me, I am a lesser person, and those who died stop being honoured.

But the bit I find hardest from visiting this memorial museum, and it’s a key reflection that stayed with me after the visit to the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem as well, is the sadness that humanity seems incapable of learning from the past. 

Why is it that we can all recognise how awful something like the Rwandan genocide was, and yet still countries around the world are carrying out their own versions of it, to greater or lesser extents?

Why is that we can all see just how terrible the outcome can be when one group regards ‘the other’ as anything less than equal, and yet society continues to categorise, to compare and to contrast.

Whether the divisions are based on ethnicity, class, academic achievement, gender, political beliefs, religion, size of feet, colour of hair….. As long as those divisions are allowed to split societies up, then we are all guilty of creating a world where suspicion, mistrust and misuse of power play too high a part.

Oftentimes we label people without even thinking about it, and many times those labels are totally innocuous and don’t have any influence over how we interact with others. But as soon as those labels stop being harmless and start leading to comparative perspectives – that’s the start of a slippery slope that we all need to be aware of.

Outside the Genocide Memorial Museum is a large free-standing sculpture of the word ‘kwibuka’. It means ‘remember’ in Kinyarwandan and is a plea for all to remember the genocide and to learn from it. Long may the remembering, the learning and de-othering take place that little by little our world will become more tolerant, more inclusive, and more willing to celebrate the diversity that makes up humanity.