In August I spent ten days in Rwanda, ostensibly for work but I managed to squeeze in a couple of days of extracurriculars! Kigali surprised me- compared to Kampala, where I spent a few months last year, it's much cleaner, orderly and feels much safer. It's pretty light on tourist attractions and night life however. Apart from the excellent Genocide Memorial Centre and some good crafts markets, there's not much to see. There are a few decent restaurants and bars, but literally just a few! Still, it's a nice chilled city to spend a few days in.
I sent one hideously uncomfortable night in Butare in the south, where I failed to find a decent dinner and had to barricade my room door at night (not the safest of towns) before heading east to Kibuye, on the shores of Lake Kivu.
Kibuye is beautiful. A flooded mountain valley, the lake is full of islands- soaring mountain tops which are often shrouded with mist. It's an amazing landscape. We trekked around the lake much of the first day and hired a boat on the second day.
When I didn't have my tourist hat on however, I was doing research on genocide memorialisation for the African Union Human Rights Memorial. We saw some genuinely impressive attempts at societal reconciliation but it was glaringly apparent that Rwanda is heading for trouble. Recovering from genocide is an inexplicably difficult process for any society and it's impossible to say what is the "right" way to do it. The path Rwanda has chosen is already proving problematic however. Everyone we spoke to refused to disclose their ethnicity, referring to themselves only as Rwandans. This isn't as impressive as it sounds however as it was almost always disingenuous. Startling economic growth might have temporarily made Rwanda the darling of Western donors (although that era has now expired) but it hasn't magically caused deep rooted tensions to dissipate. The political language used when memorialising the genocide is particularly worrying; the genocide itself is almost always referred to as the 'Tutsi genocide'. This exclusive language is indicative of a wider political mindset.
This isn't mere nitpicking. Introduced in 2010, Rwanda's Anti-Genocide law claims to stop genocide denial. Hard to argue with that, right? Except it has been used to target opposition politicians who have called for the thousands of Hutus who were killed in the immediate aftermath of the 1994 genocide -whether through reprisal killings or disease- to be memorialised. Calling for appropriate acknowledgement of other victims is not denying the genocide happened. But that is how it is viewed n Kagame's Rwanda- you are for us or against us.
Kagame is due to step down in 2017. He could change the constitution in order to remain or step down in accordance with the law, in which case the country could be plunged into uncertainty. I'm not an expert on Rwandan affairs by any means but the impression I got from being in the country was far from optimistic. Having spoken to journalists and human rights experts infinitely more intimate with Rwanda since my return, I am even more pessimistic about where the country is heading, if the current situation remains.
But anyway, politics aside, it was a good trip.
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