I’m sitting in Bourbon, per usual, sipping on my daily cup of African tea and munching on deliciously sumptuous forkfuls of warm banana cake as I respond to emails, update this blog, and do other necessary internet work (i.e. facebook). Bourbon Coffee at the Union Trade Center (UTC) is the unofficial hub of umuzungu activity in Kigali, and all around me, there are other umuzungus doing the exact same thing. But do you know what the best part about my arrangement is?

African Tea at Bourbon Coffee 🙂

It’s completely free. All of it.

Sure, networking is important in the United States and everywhere else in the world, but here in Kigali it is absolutely crucial to have connections if you want to get anything done. And, of course, there are always the added perks that come with knowing people – like free African tea, cake, internet, drinks, taxi-moto rides, meals, ice cream, earrings, etc. I never would have thought that in two months, I could walk into Papyrus and immediately be served a complimentary steak or grilled tilapia dinner and a cup of fresh passion fruit juice. Papyrus is a classy restaurant bar by day, and the most popular club at night where Kigali gathers every weekend to dance until 6am. The moment I walk into Papyrus on Friday or Saturday night, the DJ puts on my song (“Stereo love”) and I find a glass of Malibu Pineapple waiting for me at the packed bar where dozens of people are impatiently clamoring for their drinks. If I step into the patisserie next to the bar, I have warm buttery croissants, lemon cake, samosas, cookies, and sandwiches to choose from as I please.

It’s pretty fantastic. However, aside from having wonderful friends all over Kigali, the most important connections have been those that have provided the means for me to do research and help my students.

As I discussed at length in my previous post, attempting to do research here has been frustrating and nearly impossible without the right connections. I’ve learned to remind people of scheduled appointments a day in advance, the day of, and an hour before, and still expect that they will be an hour late. I’ve also learned to schedule seven interviews for one day to ensure that three will actually happen. However, even with all those steps, research would have been impossible without the help of others in powerful positions. For instance, I was told that I needed signed authorization from Gasabo District to visit public primary schools. One contact was able to put me directly in touch with the District manager and physically hand him my petition. I was assured that my petition would be approved the next day. One day passed, I called and was told it would be signed the next day; I called the next day, and was promised that it would be signed the next; I called the next day … and so on. After four days, my call wasn’t even picked up.

It was time to bring in a connection even higher up in the power structure. Over coffee at Bourbon, I complain to my friend about my research woes. He laughs and assures me that everything will be fine. One text message from him and ten minutes later, I receive a profuse apology from Gasabo District accompanied by clearance to do research in all the public schools in Rwanda. No need to have signed authorization. Go figure.

It’s all about who you know. Seriously. One of my friends came to Rwanda to research horticulture (which is anything but controversial), and she was also told that she first needed to draft a petition to research and have it authorized. She waited over four months for approval and encountered many other obstacles that made it very difficult to conduct her research.

Last weekend, I came into contact with several interesting figures. The first, an American member of the UN Security Unit who is in charge of arresting war criminals and escorting the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon at public events. From him, I learned more about the unpublished details of the August 11 bombing and the recent UN report. (I’ll discuss this in more detail in my upcoming Politics post). In the United States, I think the general perception of the UN is positive, but in Rwanda, UN workers are among the most hated people in the country. Why? Well, first there’s the history of the UN’s role (or lack of a role) in the 1994 genocide; it’s failure to recognize or do anything to stop the massacre of hundreds of thousands. Second, the majority of Rwandans I’ve spoken to see the current UN presence as a useless organization composed of people who are qualified to do nothing. Unfortunately, my encounters with two UN workers confirm these views. The Security Unit worker that I met has been in the country for almost a year, but does not know the names of any of the districts in Kigali. He imports fancy cars from the US and drives around Kigali in a flashy red sportscar. However, it wasn’t his ignorance about the country that appalled me, so much as his attitude toward local Rwandese. He generally refrains from interacting with Rwandans, but when he does, his manner is patronizing. He wanted his cook to prepare lunch for us and when the cook didn’t understand his specific instructions, he started yelling, “What are you smoking? Are you on dope?” When his cook left, he turned to me, shaking his head. “These people,” he muttered.

After hearing about my research project, he insisted on driving me to the different primary schools for my interviews. He said that he had the next four days off and he had nothing to do except plan BBQs. Although I was hesitant about enlisting the help of someone I barely knew, since I figured he’d have a better idea of how to navigate around Kigali than I did, I finally accepted. Boy, was that a mistake. We drove around in circles in his little red sportscar, and whenever I insisted that we stop and ask for directions, he would roll down his window, rudely beckon over people and ask for directions in slow ungrammatical English as if the people were idiots. Currently, he also has a side project to create a security company in Rwanda, except since his job with the UN does not permit him to start such a venture, he tells me “oh yeah, the company is run by my cook and security guards” and gives me a knowing wink. Before coming to Rwanda, the perception I had from the media prepared me to expect rampant corruption among government officials – instead, I find the most corrupt individuals working for NGOs and outside organizations like the UN. The second UN worker I know is even ruder, if that is possible. I don’t even want to repeat his treatment of my Rwandan friends here on this blog.

The second person I met last weekend was an Indian businessman aiming to expand his England-based company into Rwanda and Burundi. Over the course of a three hour dinner, we talked about our projects in Rwanda, our goals for the future, and our perspectives on purpose and life. He is now a sponsor for the Learning Centre, and last Friday, he transferred funds to me to give to the LC. Now, we are working on a project to provide a means for the students to make enough money to pay for a university education. Currently his plan is to ship cell phones to the school (which would be free of charge for his company) and for the LC students to keep the money from the sales. I’m looking into the legality of such an arrangement, and I’m still not sure if cell phones are the best idea for sales, but regardless – I’m excited about the opportunity to do anything to brighten my students’ futures.

I’m also looking into the possibility of finding my students jobs with the Masaka Farms patisserie at Papyrus, and a local ice cream shop in Kigali. Without degrees or connections, my students don’t stand a chance of finding jobs, but through the connections that I’ve forged, I can potentially do something for my students while I am still here. That’s why I’ve extended my visit for another week and I’ve rebooked my plane ticket for 9/18 instead of 9/11. It means that classes start the day after I get back and I won’t really have time to adjust, but I really can’t leave right now just when all the doors are opening. So that means another week of blogging! Thank you for reading, and stay posted for exciting updates in the days ahead 🙂

Not too far from Kigali, down a long stretch of dirt road that winds past farm fields and vast expanses of green, there are two small churches that stand as reminders of the horrors of the genocide. Behind the twisted metal doors of Nyamata Church, over 10,000 people were brutally murdered in 1994.

The tour guide, a graceful young woman with a quiet voice, greets me and beckons me inside the dark sanctuary. One step inside of the shadows and I’ve stepped into history. It’s not just the musty smell of clothes covered in dried blood, its the heavy silence, the thin beams of light filtering through the bullet holes in the ceiling, the rotting cloth on the altar. The bodies are gone, but everything else has been preserved and I am surrounded by death. Everywhere around me on rows and rows of pews are the clothes of those killed.

But immediately, there is an obvious question: The church is so small – how did 10,000 people fit into such a confined space?

The tour guide nods, this is a familiar question. “It seems impossible, but you have to believe it,” she says, “They saw the soldiers coming and they fled here. If they had not been massacred, they would have died in a couple hours from suffocation.”

She leads me to the altar, on which several of the weapons of the killing remain. A machete, a bullet, a spear. Traditional weapons were the tools of choice since they were abundant and inflicted the greatest pain. Overlooking the altar, a statue of Virgin Mary stands with hands clasped, eyes looking up toward a ceiling peppered with bullet holes. The tour guide directs my attention to the splotches of black stains on the ceiling just above the altar. “They lay the victims on the altar to kill them,” she says, “You had to pay for bullets. Otherwise, they killed you with the machete – she slashes her hand through the air and points at the ceiling – so that the blood reaches up.”

In both churches, there is one wall that is completely stained with dried blood and the clothes that lie on the floor are much more compactly assembled than elsewhere in the churches.

“Here, they murdered children,” she tells me, “They killed them by taking them and hitting them against the walls.”

We walk downstairs into a small memorial that was constructed after the genocide. There, one coffin sits behind glass enveloped in beams of white light.

“The most beautiful woman in Rwanda,” she says, “She refused to marry Hutu, so in the genocide, they raped her, tortured her, and cut her from genitals to face. On both sides, front and back.”

We walk back upstairs and out of the church to the back. There, lie the mass graves of over 40,000 – the bones of the 10,000 from the church and the bodies of 30,000 more from the surrounding area. There are two structures: one for the bones of those whose bodies had already rotted away, and one for fresh bodies found in streams, latrines, etc. that could not be laid with the bones.

I see steps leading down into the graves and question the guide. She says that I may enter but suggests that my friend accompany me in case I get scared. He says no. I enter alone.

As I descend the steps and lose sight of the world outside, once again, the sense of history overwhelms me. I am part of the shadow. In the darkness, I can make out the skulls lined on shelves just a couple feet away. I step down from the last step and walk in.

All around me are rows and rows of skulls and bones on shelves that extend deep into the chamber far past my line of vision. The light from the staircase barely outlines the tens of thousands of round surfaces, some of which bear the marks of machetes, others with multiple punctures from bullets.

I suddenly cough and gasp. I realize I had stopped breathing.

I fumble with the clasp of my purse and reach in for my camera. I hesitate. What am I doing? I am standing in a mass grave, surrounded by the bones of people who were massacred just sixteen years ago, and my first response is to take a picture?

Nausea hits me and I reel.

I can’t allow myself to have emotion, can’t allow myself to think. I have to save that for later. I take the camera out, and before I can allow myself to further contemplate the morality of my actions, I take a couple pictures, close-up, then farther away, with flash, without flash.

In the meantime, the skulls remain silent, lined on their shelves, sitting still as I apply the rule of thirds and try different angles to maximize the lighting.

The last click. I take my eye away from the camera and place it back in my bag.

Silence. Darkness. Stillness.

I walk back in and stand close to the shelf, my face just an inch away from a skull. Who are you? What was your story? How old were you?

Silence.

I stare into gaping holes that once held eyes that embraced life, absorbed experiences. But the eyes are gone. There is only darkness. Once a subject. Now an object. The unrecognizable abject amidst rows of identical thousands.

My friend calls. I tear my eyes away from impenetrable darkness and remember the light from the staircase. I walk back, ascend steps toward the sun and the living.

Stop. Take a look back down.

Silence. Darkness. Stillness.

I can barely make out the outline of the skull nearest the stairs.

My friend calls again. This time I don’t look back.

I leave history in its grave, but take with me the legacy of the silenced – a reminder for the future, a command of Never Again, a hope for harmony and peace in a new Rwanda.

Later, I hear the story of the guide. She was in this church in 1994. When the soldiers came, she fled with her sister and sought refuge inside a nearby creek. For two months, she hid waist-deep in the water, skin rotting, but too afraid to emerge for fear of being seen. Her parents did not escape; their bones lie unidentified within the depths of the mass grave. She was seven years old.

Now, she works at the Genocide Memorial as a volunteer. She has no job. She lives off of the funds that the government gives to Genocide survivors. Everyday, she sits at the site of death, telling the story of the church to those who will hear it. Her single occupation in life is to preserve the story, preserve the legacy of its victims, of her parents, of horrors that can never be erased as her country steps forward – forward into a brighter future that she hopes will never forget the lessons of its past.

It’s been a while since I’ve discussed politics on this blog – not because I haven’t been thinking about it (because I have been thinking about it constantly) but because I’ve needed time to formulate my thoughts.

Many of you – friends and family – have asked me about the controversy of the elections, the bombing on August 11, and the recent U.N. Report claiming a double-genocide in Rwanda. I have my own thoughts on all three of these topics, but honestly, I think that it’s more important for me to share with you the perspective of Rwandans I have spoken to rather than detail my own barely formulated opinions.

Upcoming Inauguration Ceremony for President Kagame

I will do this in two parts – first, I want to discuss freedom of expression in Rwanda. Second, I want to examine recent events and the current political situation. To preface both posts, I want to emphasize that the perspectives outlined here by no means represent the views of the entire country or my own views (although my presentation may obviously be biased). I also want to note that I will not be naming names for the privacy of the individuals with whom I have spoken.

The goal of this blog is not only to document my experiences in Rwanda but to also inform and challenge existing perceptions, and invite dialogue on controversial topics. My hope is not only for you, my Readers, to learn something new about Rwanda from reading my posts, but to also encourage you to question your former conceptions of Rwanda – and maybe even of Africa – and reexamine these beliefs and the means by which you arrived at them.

“Why Does Rwanda Need Freedom of Expression?”

It is Friday night and we are at QQP (Quelque Parts) sitting around a table of Fantas and Primus beers. The setting is laid-back and chill – there’s some lively music in the background, you can hear soft laughter from the other thatched huts, and the only lighting is the soft glow of lanterns along the stone walkway. But the silent darkness in our hut is anything but relaxed. A couple uncomfortable shifting chairs break the heavy tension as I clear my throat.

“Er … I don’t know,” I say. My chair contributes its own awkward squeak as I shift away from the question. “I don’t really know how to answer that. That’s a good question.”

A conversation that began as a simple introduction and a couple questions about my stay in Rwanda, turned into a discussion of the August 11 bombing, which quickly exploded into a heated debate about freedom of expression in Rwanda.

How did we start talking about the bombing? I don’t quite remember. I think that I was talking about my evening class and I mentioned that I would temporarily be teaching the class of the teacher who had passed away in the attack.

The first response: “Wait. Someone died in the bombing?”

The second: “Yeah, one person.”

My response: “No, three people died.”

Everybody else’s response: DISBELIEF. “No.” “Impossible.” “Really?” “No way.”

When I assured them that yes, I knew for a fact that three people had died in the bombing and I had attended one of the funerals – to be honest, I expected shock or indignation.

The actual response? Most people just shrugged, nodded their concurrence with my statement, and continued their conversations with lit cigarettes, beers, and fantas.

I became very indignant and (perhaps because I was a tad emboldened at the time) rather out-spoken. “Wait a moment,” I said, “How is that okay? How is it okay that a bombing happens and the government can choose to not report the accurate number of deaths?”

Well, that got the fantas and beers back on the table.

My incredulity at the lack of freedom of expression was matched by the incredulity of my peers who overwhelmingly saw the rationality of the government’s restriction on “negative reports” on Rwanda. Why bother publishing a larger number and inciting more fear among the people, and further marring international perceptions of Rwanda when you could easily avoid all the trouble by reporting just one death on the second page of the newspaper?

“So ‘Ignorance is bliss‘?” I asked. And ‘what you don’t know won’t hurt you‘? As Rwandan citizens, you’re totally fine with not hearing the truth about events in Rwanda?”

The answer? Yes. Given the history in Rwanda, where the radio and newspapers were used to fuel hatred, retribution, and violence – many Rwandans believe that the Rwandan government has every right, and in fact it is the duty of the government, to take the measures that will ensure that the media won’t be abused again. These measures include removing all negative content about Rwanda from the media and, in some cases, shutting down the newspapers that do not conform to these measures.

I’ve briefly mentioned The New Times before as the sole English newspaper in Kigali. It is also the newspaper of FPR (although in America, I guess we call Kagame’s party “RPF” for Rwanda Patriotic Front?). Open up any issue and you will see pages of praise for Kagame’s party; any information about the activities of oppositional candidates is either omitted or included in the form of scathingly vicious editorials. There is absolutely nothing negative written about Rwanda – and by “negative,” I mean articles that expose poverty, corruption, or suffering. There’s no doubt about it, The New Times is a joke of journalism and even Rwandans acknowledge this and laugh at the blatantly biased newspaper. If Rwandan citizens buy daily issues for their coffee tables but dismiss The New Times as government propaganda, certainly it is understandable why the international community also doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of the newspaper?

Of course any discussion of freedom of expression would have to tie into my current project with the film industry, which has the priority of accomplishing the very opposite of censorship. I spoke with one of the members of the Cinema Centre who told me about how many of the Centre’s writers have tried to publish articles in The New Times but were rejected for “exposing poverty or negative situations” instead of focusing on Rwanda’s progress and many achievements. My friend said, “In Kampala, people talk about the president. Here, if you want to say something [negative] about the president, you whisper.” Last year, this same friend was commissioned by a Belgian(?) company to shoot a documentary about the slums in Rwanda, but was immediately denied permission. “A lot of business you can cover in Rwanda,” he said to me, “but not the poor.” Now, the film has been recommissioned to examine slums in Kenya.

Both my peers and my Cinema Centre friend acknowledge that “there is no freedom of expression” in Rwanda, but unlike my peers who accept and embrace this, my film friend sighs and shakes his head. “It is not good,” he says.

Ironically though, the government frequently relies upon the Cinema Centre to produce propaganda material for the RPF. My friend’s thoughts on this: “The government comes to you. You are not paid well but you cannot complain. You have to promote the president. We did a lot of free works because we need to contribute.”

Returning to the original question voiced by one of my peers at the meeting: Why does Rwanda need freedom of expression?

Historical context matters. As does an acknowledgment of the many strides Rwanda has taken since 1994 – the fact that there is a rising film industry, a Rwanda Writers Association, a growing music industry, increasing recognition of the arts, and the reintroduction of Rwandan history into the school curriculum. As an American who has never known life without freedom of expression, do I really have the grounds to assert that Rwanda needs to be like America? How necessary is freedom of expression especially when it has the potential to undermine stability and security? Is there a line that has to be drawn when freedom of expression works against the peace and unity the country has tried so hard to build between its people? But then again, are these merely excuses for those in the government to control and preserve their power? Is freedom of expression limited for the good of Rwandans and the good of the country, or is the censorship used for the good of those in power?

Food for thought.