He makes me feel – in my dirty sneakers and natty convertible pants – like a total scrub. But a set of modest press credentials are on my side: I have written, once, for The Washington Post – a paper of great repute. I represent, in whatever scruffy capacity, access to the great untapped media markets of the West. And for this reason alone Pierre Kayitana has invited me into his immaculate office, sat with me among the shelves of film history and theory, the bulging binders, the four-volume set of the Berkshire World Encyclopedia, ignored his phone for the better part of the past hour, and offered me a crash course in the brief history of Rwandan cinema.
It doesn’t take long; after all, the first Rwandan feature film, 100 Days, wasn’t made until the late-1990s – long before Don Cheadle and his vague, pan-African accent spoke to the world in Hotel Rwanda, but long after the West had developed its own cinematic language and traditions. By the time 100 Days was filmed in 1997 (and later released in 2001), aspiring American filmmakers had already devoured a steady diet of Chaplin, Hitchcock, Welles – not to mention later heavyweights like Scorcese and Tarantino.
“Even before the genocide, we did not have entertainments,” says Pierre, turning his empty palms up to the sky. When Eric Kabera – a Congo-born, London-educated filmmaker – paired with the BBC veteran Nick Hughes to film 100 Days, they were working more within the Western traditions they’d inherited than within a particular Rwandan form.
“You have to understand that in Rwanda, we do not have a film culture,” says Pierre. “What Eric wanted to do was create that culture here.” First, through films like 100 Days and Keepers of Memory, and later, with initiatives like the Rwanda Cinema Centre and the Rwanda Film Festival, he hoped to bring the language of cinema to a wide audience.
The early challenges faced by Kabera and his colleagues were great. There was no infrastructure in place for filmmakers. When Western media arrived to shoot stories in Rwanda, they came with crews a hundred strong. “We had no one with the technical training they needed,” Pierre explains. No cameramen, no grips, no burly guys named Bruce who could coil 100 yards of extension cord around their biceps. “They could not even say to a Rwandan, ‘Hand me that camera. Pass me the boom.’ People did not know what a camera or a boom was.”
Given the hurdles they had to overcome, the progress made by the Cinema Centre in the past four years has been remarkable. Today there are dozens of cameramen, editors, production managers, and trained technicians working in Rwanda. A program in collaboration with the Swedish Institute was inaugurated in November 2007, offering training to young Rwandan filmmakers. And Pierre is reaching out to film schools in New York and Los Angeles, with plans to introduce an exchange program for film students in Kigali. Eventually, he hopes that the Cinema Centre will grow to become a major cultural force in the region, attracting talent from Congo, Burundi, Uganda and beyond.
“There is a lot of work to be done,” he admits, looking warily toward the lengthy to-do list on the wall. An assistant raps on the door and creeps in, shooting Pierre a look of utter panic. Again the phone begins to vibrate angrily on the desk.
In its accomplishments as well as its aspirations, the Cinema Centre is a fair reflection of where Rwanda stands today. (Or as President Paul Kagame said at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, where Rwandan filmmakers were well-received: “The story of Rwandan film is essentially the story of Rwanda itself.”) The country’s recent boom has created opportunities that were unthinkable just five years ago. There’s more room for business ventures, more capital to tap into. Just two years ago, Gacuriro was a scruffy, impoverished suburb of Kigali. Today it’s a sprawling, upscale community of gated homes, tapping into much of Rwanda’s newfound wealth. New houses are rapidly being built to accommodate the growing demand. Eric Kabera, who lives with his family in Gacuriro, says the waiting list is nearly two years long.
The walk back to central Kigali hugs the golf course, where I stop to watch several figures shuffle tinily around a distant tee. Suddenly stillness: seconds later, the ping of iron striking ball, and the small bodies – hunched beneath their bags – walking wearily up the sloping fairway. The hills fronting the golf course are prime real estate, crowned by massive, white-washed villas that sit with regal aplomb over the greens. More houses are being built, and hordes of workers busy themselves adjusting the sconces and tidying the lawns and running lengths of cable through the windows.
Further down, by the 17th hole, I pass a dozen bare-chested boys playing in murky swamps beside the fairway. Muscular women – their bright skirts and headscarves dazzling in the sunlight – work a rusty water pump, carrying their jerry cans through the reeds and trudging barefoot along the side of the road. Evening is falling. Motos putter through the golden late-day light; crowded taxis-voutures whisk the work-day crowds back to their homes in the hills. Outside a small storefront cinema, a group of young boys crane their necks to read the titles scrawled across a dusty chalkboard. Strike Commandos. Ninja Condor 13. The boys kick and karate-chop each other on the sidewalk, pop imaginary guns into the air.
If the guys at the Cinema Centre want to create a film culture here in Rwanda, they’ve got a long, bumpy road ahead.
Somehow a country learns to grieve and cope and rebuild; but a country can’t possibly forget – not when the atrocities reach the apocalyptic scale of 1994. Not only in the eyes of the West, but in the eyes of Rwandans themselves, history has been defined by the genocide. It created a world of “before” and “after,” a world where a boy I meet in the Place de l’Unité National can tell me about the family murdered by Hutu militias, and then ask in the same matter-of-fact voice if I have any brothers back home. In this world grief and remembrance are part of the daily routine; each day the New Times announces another genocide suspect arrested in France, alongside the latest sports scores or business reports of another solid quarter.
And there are other, more troubling, stories: a school closed in Rusizi district because its teachers were preaching genocide ideology; a body found near Gikongoro in the south – a survivor who testified in a gacaca court and was the victim of reprisals. Despite its spectacular growth and recovery, Rwanda remains in a low-level conflict with itself. Tension runs high in much of the country; for many, whatever lessons were taught by the genocide have already been forgotten. Eruptions of violence in post-colonial Rwanda have been episodic, generational: ’59, ’73, ’94. Is it just a matter of time, then, before Rwandans start killing again? Or with enough stability and prosperity, enough faith in their common future, can Rwandans build the country they’ve never truly had?
Against this backdrop I visit the Gisozi Genocide Memorial, a dim, sober tribute to the victims and survivors of ’94. It’s modest in scale, considering the enormity of the crimes behind it. Designed by a local architect – and conceived by a former mayor of Kigali – it has an air of being built as much for the Western world as for the people whose lives and deaths it commemorates. The first section is long on Rwandan history – the bitter years of colonial rule, the first stirrings of ethnic hatred. It’s a frank rebuke to the more popular story in the West, where the easier narrative to swallow was one of “ancestral hatred” – a story line that had less to do with political calculation and economic grievance than some sort of primal bloodlust. It was a theory that fit neatly into the usual Western narrative, where violence is scripted into the African’s DNA, and where blacks killing blacks is how it’s always been.
But it was a narrative that unfortunately ignored historical truths. It was colonial Belgium, after all, that first hardened fluid ethnic identities into dogma, and it was a bitter and repressive policy by the colonial government that created and fed the violence between Hutus and Tutsis. The history of “ancestral hatred” can only, in fact, be traced back to the first reported ethnic killing in1959 – making it about as ancestral as Little Caesars pan pizzas or I Love Lucy. By couching the genocide in such bogus historical terms, we were able to wash our own hands of culpability in the massacre: whether or not the West intervened, Rwandans would go on killing each other as they had before.
As more and more evidence of the killings reached Western diplomats, strongly worded warnings and resolutions poured from the UN. But who would sacrifice their own sons and daughters to stop the violence? The slaughter of eighteen soldiers in Mogadishu was still fresh in American minds. There was no political will to involve ourselves in another African mess; there were even misleading reports that the killings were just an extension of the country’s civil war of the early-‘90s. That this didn’t exactly square with the systematic, targeted killings of a distinct minority didn’t seem to trouble our politicians. When Africans start slaughtering each other by the hundreds of thousands, it’s best not to poke around for details.
The sense of indignation at being abandoned by the West – ignored by the UN, brutally betrayed by the French, who conspired in much of the slaughter – burns throughout the memorial. And the unflinching reports of the killings force us to confront our own shame: how we could let ourselves be complicit in such atrocious crimes. Two sisters thrown into a deep cistern and then crushed by rocks; women crucified on trees; a man shot and left to suffer for three days before the killers returned to finish the job. It’s possible to imagine how a man, when threatened with his own life, might reluctantly bring himself to kill. But to do it with such macabre theatrics involves a certain eagerness and an active imagination. Weapons of the genocide are displayed in trophy cases: rusty rifles and spears, clubs and pangas, an old chair leg studded with nails. While the West was finding creative ways to stay out of Rwanda – as when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright refused to distinguish between “acts of genocide” and genocide itself – Rwandans themselves were showing their own flair for ingenuity. A hundred days, after all, is a very long time to kill.
There’s silent footage of the wreckage, the human carnage, found around the country in the genocide’s aftermath: charred bodies heaped in a church, corpses on the side of the road, children showing deep machete cuts on their heads, or wagging the stumps of their butchered hands at the camera. And there are survivors’ stories played on video screens. A man remembers his second son, Jean-Claude, who used to sit in the living room and listen to the news. “It used to make me think he would be a journalist or a politician,” he says. Jean-Claude was killed by the militias, along with his mother and his siblings. Another man – he must be about my age – remembers how anxious families, desperate to buy protection, bribed the Interahamwe with what little food they had left after the genocide began. For three, four days, his mother bought their survival with goat, with potatoes and rice – whatever scraps she found around the house. Before long there were only beans left; the man knew their time was up. Yet somehow his mother fed them vegetables and passion fruits for dinner on her last night – he can’t imagine where, in those killing fields, she had managed to find passion fruits. His voice constricts around the words, and then he can’t go on. It was the last dinner they would have together.
The stories are played on an endless loop, and there’s something sadly fitting, something bitterly poignant, in that repetition. Survivors – most of them alive for reasons they’ll never understand – will have to bear the weight of their trauma for the rest of their lives. It’s a nightmare they’ll be forced to relive, that will wake them on restless nights, that will shatter the calm of a summer afternoon.
A woman, her hair neatly coiffed in stiff waves, shakes her head at a question posed to her off-camera. “Forgiveness is from God,” she says, her eyes burning. “I am only human.”
It’s in the last room I visit, though, that my emotions get the best of me. Here, while more survivors tell their tales of grief and loss, hundreds of snapshots are hung from the walls. Young and old, frozen in time in their wedding dresses and football kits, their suits and blue jeans, looking solemn, startled, restless, happy, full of human emotion. Here stands a young man in a track suit, his knees slightly bent, as if he’s ready to spring into action, there a couple slices their wedding cake, the frosting licking at their knuckles. Here a woman dances in a pretty blue dress, her stout arms wagging in the air, while two women, seated nearby, double over with laughter. Here a man stands grinning and baffled in a blue tuxedo with a bright pink boutonnière, there a couple lies on a picnic blanket on a sunny hillside, their young daughter curled between them. Here a trim man in blue jeans, smiling, sitting outside his house, pours beer into a plastic cup. Here a woman in floral-print pants, squatting, anxious, looks off-camera toward some unseen troubles, there a frowning old matron, arms folded across her bosom, stares forward candidly through her thick-framed glasses. The poet Czeslaw Milosz once wrote that “to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name.” What words do we have, then, to cope with the enormity of our loss?
Outside the workers are trimming and pruning in the garden. It’s a bright day, full of promise. Nearby a sign cautions, “Please, do not step on mass graves.” A reminder, in this wounded country, to be careful how you tread.
