By Gerald Witt
I first notice the many armed guards at the airport. Rwanda is a peaceful country, albeit one in the long shadow of genocide. It has been stable for decades.
At customs, the agent asks what I do for a living. I don’t understand. I need a student visa. I’m with a group from the University of Georgia. He presses. How do I make money? Despite my jet-lagged mind, I suss it out. He wants to know my intentions in Rwanda. Uh, I’m … a … writer.
An eyeroll later, he stamps my passport. I am officially in the country.
Dry equatorial air and a crowd of people wait for tourists, partners, loved ones and friends outside the Kigali International Airport, along with our ride to the Hotel Chez Lando.
I load a bus. We exit the tidy airport parking lot. Palm trees sway in the night breeze. There is no trash along the roadside. No messiness of life, no errant cigarette butts, no takeout napkins tied up in tufts of grass. No cans rattling in the gutter.
Kigali is arrestingly clean.
At a stoplight, a motorbike with two riders buzzes up alongside our small bus. Another arrives, and soon, dozens more. Before the light turns green, a phalanx of motorbikes surrounds our bus and crashes toward the intersection. Our bus diesels forward and toward the hotel while two-wheelers cut between our vehicle’s girth and medians, among cars, even into oncoming traffic.
A motorbike is an inexpensive way to get around in cities across the developing world, like Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. I ask someone where all these motorbikes are going. I’m told that it is a cheap ride across town. Everybody in this city seems to be going somewhere, but I can’t pinpoint where or why. Each time I ask, someone tells me that motorbikes are easy and cheap. But nobody says where everyone is going.
There seems to be a coordination of shared scripts in Rwanda. When our UGA group talked to several dozen college students in Kigali, nearly all told us that they want to help their community in some way. Eerily, they have the same ambition. A generation of people who just want to give back.
We visit a village where genocide widows weave sisal into earrings and baskets. They feed us simple food. We use their outhouse. My classmates happily pick up hoes and clear weeds from a dirt path as women in the village show us how they earn a living with woven goods. This whole scene depressed me, though, and not because I’m some white guy who saw a different life than my own and was struck with an epiphany of self-awareness. No, I was saddened by the creeping knowledge that this scene might be a regular performance of some kind, not all that different from guided trips into the slums of major cities.
At another village, within Kigali city limits, we dance with girls while a drum beats on red dirt. The villagers are united under Christianity. We listen to a widow, an orphan, and someone who committed genocide. They share the same message. Reconciliation means we all must accept what we’ve done, and what was done to us, and forgive.
A guide pulls me aside. He whispers.
Hutus and Tutsis definitely know who each other are. And they do not marry.
Only a generation has passed since the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis. Six years after the slaughter, in 2000, Paul Kagame became president, and remains in power, netting 98 percent of votes in the most recent election. A dollar, or Euro, goes far here. Tourism is the top industry in Rwanda, and the country’s hospitality industry is exceptional at welcoming visitors. People come for wildlife safaris, primarily, but others travel for visits like mine, to see the scars of genocide. I traveled to learn. What can I see at the edge of humanity, from the depths of genocide and a country’s recovery? What I observed is a cautious banality that seems to pervade among the people.
The cautious: Waiters open bottles in front of patrons to show that drinks are not poisoned, a cultural tic that leans back to the genocide and other mass killings before then. All buildings have security staff at the door, often armed, and your bag rolls through a metal detector when entering a grocery store. If tourism is the national industry, then security jobs seem to employ the most Rwandans.
Banality appeared at lunchtime. Nearly every day we ate peas, fufu, rice, beans, and thoroughly grilled chicken or goat. Simple food served with dignity, but all similar. The meals, rooted in the past, felt like a reminder that the country is stuck in gear.
There was the feeling of an absence, of people who were slaughtered by machete, shot or exiled. The ongoing act of memorializing genocide victims in Rwanda remains incomplete. A generation of people are mired in mourning. We visited memorial sites. We peered into mass graves. Victim remains are still being found. Genocide underscores everything we see.
Though Kigali is a city of 1.7 million, a general quietness pervades.
There is no visible counterculture. Everyone seems to be aligned and moving in the same direction, like a dozen motorbikes at a stoplight.
Many Rwandans speak softly, at a volume just above a whisper. I lean in often. What I hear, from one Rwandan to another, is eerily similar. We are Rwanda. Most Rwandans are genuinely friendly. But everywhere we go, something that’s intangible looms. While Americans celebrate individualism, the word unity is a refrain in Rwanda. Journalists tell us about solutions journalism and less about their challenges to the government. Even in the village, far from the oversight of authority, people tell us that they simply unite. I feel an unsettling kumbaya and come to this realization: Authoritarianism doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it appears in what is absent.
Understandably, many Rwandans avoid reopening old wounds. Maybe most Rwandans prefer a low volume, prefer to go unnoticed. Maybe the pervasive quiet is an effort to avoid oversight that cannot be observed or touched, but authoritatively understood.
In the United States, where a chef who yells at food gets his own TV show, we are not known for silent self-reflection. We are bombastic. Less self-aware. Our current president hung banners of his stern face on federal buildings. Meanwhile, our government is erasing and whitewashing difficult history, including moments when the U.S. has killed its own people. The American tradition to rush forward, mixed with a penchant for revisionist history, often turns our bleeding offenses into old news.
Rwanda has done what Americans try to avoid. Rwandans looked in the mirror, admitted their most awful of crimes against their own, and worked to correct for their worst moments. We can learn something about ourselves from them, if we could just listen.
Gerald Witt is working on a master’s degree in narrative nonfiction at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
