It was 1994 when one of the bloodiest genocides in African history took place in Rwanda. The country has changed a lot since then, becoming a symbol of rebirth, reconciliation and economic development. Kigali is now considered the capital of African ecology, a champion of progress in which environmental policies and renewable energy, with the cleaning and care of public green areas, are the workhorse. But Kigali, although it has drastically turned over a new leaf, is also the city of memory, as a warning to new generations, about the appalling mistakes of the past.
One word constantly recurs among Rwandan communities, amahoro, which literally means ‘peace’, used to greet friends and acquaintances, or anyone one meets every day on their path. It is precisely peace and stability, today, that motivates the Rwandan people and conditions their way of life. It is hard to imagine that a developed, clean and functional city like Kigali, with its quiet, welcoming and discreet people, its colourful markets, its bicycle paths and its green flowerbeds, was the theatre and the epicentre of the terrible genocide that led, only a few decades ago, to the extermination in a few days of about 1 million Tutsis.
Today, in memory of this sad chapter in history, a number of memorials/museums are open to the public that retrace, through visits to symbolic sites, charnel houses, exhibitions of objects and images, the stages of what happened in the spring of 1994.
The Kigali Genocide Memorial in Gisozi (a true place of remembrance for thousands of victims), the Camp Kigali Memorial (where a commando of Belgian paratroopers was slaughtered) and the Campaign Against Genocide Museum (which celebrates the armed liberation role played by the political party of the current president Paul Kagame), are dutiful and unmissable visits to the capital, indispensable to enter in religious silence and respect, into the sad contemporary history of this nation, before being able to savour, and even more appreciate, its current festive and colourful atmosphere of rebirth and reconciliation, to be able to fully enjoy its orderly and clean tranquillity, and to immerse oneself in the everyday life of a city that is ‘green’ in every sense, on a human scale, where brotherhood and progress have become synonymous with peace and environmental protection, as a common good.
And so we stand before the shrines of thousands Tutsis, adults, elderly, women and children, massacred and exterminated with the complicity of the then government force, with the tacit complicity also of the international missions that preferred to abandon the country to its tragic fate.
Clothes and scraps of fabric, objects and photographs of people who led normal lives, of children who went to school or played football, who were suddenly exterminated by machine guns or machete blows, because they had become enemies in spite of themselves, simply because of ethnicity.
Strong moments, of reflection and emotion, but also of anger, in front of the photographic portraits affixed to the walls of the Gisozi Memorial, physiognomies of human beings of whom nothing remains but a few skeleton parts and a few garments, also on display, so as not to forget.
But today, Kigali is the city of rebirth and redemption, of economic dynamism and renewable energy, of sustainable neighbourhoods and urban utopias, where you can stroll safely through well-maintained and clean boulevards, to the colourful and orderly Kimironko Market, amid colourful fabrics, organic products and local handicrafts. The city where plastic bags are banned and the use of bicycles as a sustainable means of transport is encouraged. The capital of the African future, which tries to enhance its traditional art and culture, its history and origins, without forgetting its darkest chapter, celebrated through the memory in the places/symbols, but where today only the warrior and virile movements of the Intore national dance remain, staged by groups of professional dancers at every official ceremony, dressed in traditional fabrics, leather parure and feline horsehair.
