Kigali

Culture shock. That’s how I describe Kigali after having been in poorer towns, and especially having spent so long in Tanzania. Kigali is busy, booming, business, and bars. There are so many young people working in coffee shops, startup hubs and co-working spaces, restaurants, that I just forgot I am still in Afrika. Plus sometimes really excellent (rwandan-sourced) coffee. Cars mostly behave here, it’s a lot less hectic than Dar es Salaam, but definitely more polluted with seriously disgusting trucks and busses sometimes. And very, very, very hilly. But all in all, it is the most European and modern city I have visited during this entire trip, excluding maybe Austrian cities.

I stumbled on the prime minister’s office next to the hostel Im staying in, and it’s nothing short of a palace. Pictures not allowed. There is virtually no chance of political opposition in this country (usually tortured, imprisoned, or otherwise silenced, from what I read online), but mister Kagame did have an important role to play in stopping the genocide in 1994.

Now I cannot possibly give a full account of the genocide and history in a travel blog, so let me give it to you in a dumbed-down version:
- Rwanda is a former colony of first the Germans, and then the Belgians. The Germans already started in amplifying the pre-existent distinction between Hutu’s and Tutsi’s, which was formerly a distinction between economic classes (mostly; the Tutsi’s were also mostly the ones in powerful positions), but the Belgians divided everything by making it purely racial, and forcing everyone to have their “race” in the identity cards.
- First Belgium missionaries and the administration only educated Tutsi’s, then they left after Hutu’s started an independence movement, and sided with only the Hutu’s. Suddenly.
- Hutu’s were,due to the racial distinction imposed by the Belgians, convinced that all and only the Tutsi’s were to blame for their status, and full on attacks, and deportation of Tutsi’s, started after about 1962.
- The Belgians and French fully backed the Hutu’s against the Tutsi’s, who were fighting against being deported or killed.

And then in 1994 possibly the cruelest genocide in modern history began, with Tutsi’s being killed on the streets, in (claimed “safe”) churches, in stadiums, raped and worse, children killed so that the entire bloodline would be wiped out (all Hutus had tutsi blood because previously also cross-class marriages and children were very common, but hatred makes blind), etc. Churches full of bodies, streets full of bodies, which lasted about a 100 days. (Go and watch Hotel Rwanda; based on the account of a guy who turned into a opponent of the current regime and is now imprisoned…)

I visited one of the churches, in Nyamata, and the huge memorial site in Kigali; while looking for the latter I found myself closer to a museum of Rwandan history in the Kandt house, were I also got to hang out with some deadly snakes and stand within a meter of a crocodile. Way better than a safari.

In the church of Nyamata you still see gunshot-holes everywhere, holes from Granate explosions, and they also preserved some of the skulls for display of the traumas caused in the genocide. Really, really disturbing.

Ok, finishing on a better note: I am heading to national parks and am going in search of some monkeys and coffee. I won’t leave Rwanda until I have a picture of me hugging a coffee tree. (Brought by the Germans by the way.)Read more