Murambi

So, I said I wasn’t sure if I would visit Murambi. I’d been to Gisozi, the main memorial centre in Kigali when I first came and just didn’t know if I wanted to make that journey again. Anyway, today I did.
The site is a former secondary school. The main building looms large over the hill but is otherwise unremarkable. As you approach the entrance though there is the large sign written in kinyarwanda, on purple cloth. These are dotted all over the country and mark memorial sites dedicated to the 800,000 people who were killed over 100 days of the genocide…

When we arrived we were met by Claudine, our guide. One of the first things she tells us is that she was here with her husband and 3 children in May 1994. Her husband, daughter and son were killed but she escaped with her baby who at the time was 1 month old. She now works here.

We walked around the back of the main building and were led to one of about four long blocks of brick which used to be classrooms. In one block there were about 10 rooms. We stopped outside the first door and before we had time to think about what was behind it, it was suddenly pushed open and I saw for the first time the human cost…

Claudine said that over 50,000 people had been killed here. In the rooms, on raised wooden structures, there lay bodies which even as skeletons revealed the brutality inflicted on them. You can still see wedding rings and even what clothes they were wearing. I don’t know why but I found this particularly distressing - I guess wearing clothes is very human and just underlined the fact that every single one of these bodies represented an individual whose life was extinguished through the most abhorrent acts of inhumanity. Faces were contorted into haunted expressions and in some cases arms held up in a futile attempt to stop the inevitable. The corpses, preserved as they are in lime, looked frozen and seemed to capture the very moment of their deaths. Some rooms were filled just with babies and children, their tiny bodies bearing the same marks as the adult ones. One of the most poignant images I have is that of bodies lying side by side with their arms wrapped around each other. Most of the killings were carried out with machetes. I know this because I’ve read about it but seeing for myself the smashed skulls and decapitated limbs, as I went from room to room, was all the more horrific…