In Nyamata and N’tarama, the churches are the only buildings surrounded by iron railings topped with spikes. As if the two memorials on their premises required better protection than any other home or public building.
The project for the Nyamata Memorial was conceived when the first rainy season began. The remains of the people slaughtered around the church, hastily buried with bulldozers by the killers, were starting to heave up from the earth and be swept away by rushing rainwater. Feral dogs and cats were already fighting over these sites.
At the time, in the pillaged town, neither the authorities nor the leading citizens could finance any costly identification of the victims. Foreign donors, for their part, were concerned above all with the fate of the fugitives in the refugee camps abroad. That is why the inhabitants of Nyamata undertook to disinter the bodies with hoes and protect the bones by placing them in the church. As the months went by, to these corpses were added any remains, scattered and unidentifiable, discovered in fields, ditches, wells, pens, woods, and rivers. Thus was born the idea of the Memorial “to try,” as Innocent puts it, “despite our poverty, to give the forgotten victims at least some humble dignity.”
A simple sign planted in front of the gate announces the Memorial. At the threshold of the church, the pungent odor of death waits in ambush. The concrete nave of the church is empty, feebly illuminated by sunlight filtering through holes in the roof. To the left, in plain sight on a table in a vaulted sacristy, like a macabre and emblematic sculpture, lie the entwined and mummified bodies of a mother and her child, still pierced by the wooden spikes used to mutilate them to death.
The Memorial was built behind the nave in a kind of burial vault at the bottom of some concrete steps, where the stench of death is suffocating. Sitting on the last step, visitors peer in the wan light at the remains laid out on shelves. Lined up at the top are some shrouded bodies that were found intact; the next shelf down holds skulls; lower still lie the sternums, pelvises, femurs.… These heaps of skulls are fascinating, of course. Their orbits all seem to be staring at you from the beyond. Many skulls show signs of fractures; some are even still transfixed by knives.
In all, sixty-four niches, on four levels, contain the bones of around twenty-five thousand victims. Beneath the church, a neon-lit crypt with tiled walls is almost finished. A few bodies are already on view there, in a less crude and more aseptic atmosphere, to accommodate particularly emotional visitors.
Twelve or thirteen miles away, in the church at N’tarama, the militias never bothered to dig mass graves because the church, built some distance from their homes, was off their beaten path. The thousands of bodies were abandoned out in the open during the genocide. Afterward it was too late for the survivors to come retrieve the remains of their relatives and friends, because the rains and animals had been hard at work. At first, therefore, people protected the site with iron fencing. Then they decided to keep it as it was, in remembrance. In other words, to leave all those corpses in situ, as they were at the moment of death, like a scene from Pompeii: piled up between the benches, beneath the altar, crumpled along the walls, in their dresses, pagnes, shorts, among the suitcases, eyeglasses, flipflops, shoes, aprons, jugs, basins, sheets, necklaces, books, foam mattresses, all steeped in the high reek of death. Later, because of the prohibitive cost of preservative materials, a shelter was built to store some of the skulls and bones scattered outside the church.
Today caretakers are posted at the doors of the two deconsecrated churches to welcome the countless V.I.P.s, foreign or Rwandan, and the teams of journalists who must now make pilgrimages there. These caretakers present for inspection bulky “visitors’ books” filled with signatures and many phrases such as, “So we never forget!,” “Our hearts are with you!,” and as one might expect, multiple inscriptions of “Never again!,” already familiar in another context.
In N’tarama, one of the guides is Marc Nsabimana. He is a retired soldier, and a Hutu. Shortly before the war, he had returned to farm some land in the area. Married to a Tutsi, he tried to save her and some of his friends. Among the Hutu villagers, he was a helpless witness to the slaughter in the church and the marshes. Since then he has abandoned farming to devote himself to the memory of the victims. Indifferent to the heat, he lives bundled up in an anorak and punctuates every sentence by nodding his head and repeating tirelessly, “How was it possible, how was it possible?” Addressing his audience, you think at first; talking to himself, you soon realize. The other guide is Thérèse, who lives a little farther down the hill and who is herself a church survivor. She is more talkative and, when not on duty, she may often be found at Marie’s cabaret, The Widows’ Corner, chatting with her girlfriends over a Primus, especially about her day’s visitors: their nervousness, their dressy outfits, and the generosity or skimpiness of their tips.
As a sign of the times, or perhaps by coincidence, ever since the evacuation of the white priests that triggered the massacres in the churches, muzungus have almost disappeared from the region. In Kinyarwanda, the word muzungu means “a white person,” especially in the mouths of curious kids, cheerful and amused whenever they hail one going by. But linguistically, muzungu means “one who takes the place of.” With rare exceptions, the priests and the specialists and logistics experts of international organizations in Nyamata are Rwandans or Africans.
In Nyamata, the faithful have reopened the doors of a decrepit church abandoned ages ago. Along with her boarders Florence the confectioner, Gorette the cook, and Gaspard the captain of the Bugesera Soccer Club, that is where Édith Uwanyiligira now goes for Vespers and Sunday morning Mass to join all the friends with whom she prays and sings hymns.
Édith is a mother as cheerful as she is pious. Her gaiety and good nature can no longer be dampened (in public, at least) by any of life’s tribulations. She is deeply devoted to the education of her two children. Her living room is permanently occupied by the faithful; her bedrooms, by scholarly boarders; her yard, by gabby or sanctimonious neighbor ladies; her terrace, by relatives; and her garden, by noisy local kids. Just before the massacres began, Édith left her home with her husband, Jean-de-Dieu, to flee across the devastated country, carrying her son Bertrand in her arms, and in her belly, a child who became her mischievous little Sandra.