Never Again = A la prochaine...

In the international community, "Rwanda" seems to be practically synonymous with "genocide in Africa". And to some Americans, for whom Africa is simply too foreign, too distant, and too poor to ever visit, "Rwanda" will never mean anything else.

Determined not to have this attitude, I had agreed with myself not to show up in Kigali as a belated spectator of misery, interested only in the one event to get Rwanda significant international media coverage in the past fifty years. I kept my mind open to instead spectate the many other interesting things I imagined the country would have to offer, whatever they were.

I was (as usual?) more than a little naive.

15 years really isn't such a long time, especially when you're talking about the mass murder of a million people. In a small country of under 8 million people, that's nearly 15% of the entire population. Plus hundreds of thousands more permanently disabled, children orphaned, women raped by men known to be HIV+. Two-thirds of the population displaced, either families fleeing from the genocidaires or the genocidaires fleeing from the RPF; parents searching for their children and children running for their lives. Schools and hospitals targeted. Tutsi running to join the protection of the rebel army and innocent Hutus, fearing race-based reprisal, running away. For anyone over the age of about ten years old, this is an event whose effect on your life could hardly be overestimated, even if you didn't lose your entire family.

And you feel it. Even if you ignore the huge white billboards in every town and village about the "jenoside", or the frequent cemeteries by the roadside in which all the graves seem to be recent and simultaneous, even if you ignore the pink-clad teams of convicted genocidaires involved in public works projects in the countryside, you feel the memory of it. Yes, there is a lot of worthwhile things to see in Rwanda - this is one of the most strikingly beautiful landscapes I've ever seen - and no culture should be defined by one event. But despite coming overland from culturally-similar Burundi, I was foolish to expect the same atmosphere: reading the newspaper headlines, talking to locals in the capital of Kigali or by the Congolese border, even just opening your eyes and looking around: you do feel the difference.

Rwanda has not recovered. And why should it have? You don't just implode so completely the entire existence of a country and then sweep it under the rug. If only "Never Again" actually meant "jamais encore" instead of "A la prochaine.."