The Road

From Germans one would expect a high degree of organisation, while the opposite applied to anything associated with sub-Saharan Africa. Now that these stereotypes are out of the way, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s all not that clear cut, and instead of flying from Frankfurt to Kigali, the German admins chose a route that included a five hour stopover in Addis Ababa and a follow-on flight that included a detour to Burundi first to let some backpackers off, before eventually getting back north to its final destination. In contrast, the checks at the airport by the Rwandan border force and immigration control, including visa application and pass, passenger locator form, proof of vaccination, CVD test and baggage control, took a hand-stopped 6 minutes and 23 seconds.

A comparison between German and Rwandan ideas of efficiency wasn’t exactly on my radar when I started to do research on the recent history of Rwanda, but every so often the killing rate during the infamous 100 days from the 7^th of April 1994 onwards is compared with the industrial machinery installed by the Germans to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. I would also not necessarily try to position the mass killing of Tutsis by the Hutu powers and their militia in some kind of tradition of genocides, but exactly that is part of the exhibition that is the main centre of commemoration, which is the Kigali Genocide Memorial, part of which is the mass grave of 250,000 slaughtered people. Following the path laid out, I learn that the root of all the evil was German colonialism, followed by the Belgian establishment of Tutsi and Hutu as distinct “races”, followed by more and more delusional ideas of a threat Tutsis posed to the Hutu society between the sixties and the nineties, the dehumanisation of Tutsis, and eventually the institutionalised call to arms in order to exterminate all of the “insects”, embraced and orchestrated by church and state and carried out by 120,000 otherwise perfectly reasonable citizens. It could have been prevented by the UN. Easily. But the cunts run away and left the civilians on their own. That last bit is actually repeated twice, and it is more prominent than the info about the role that the retreating Rwandan Patriotic Front under the leadership of the now president Paul Kagame played, that could have chosen to protect their people a bit, but instead went back across the border to Uganda to sit down and have a breather and contemplate how to benefit from it all.

And then there is an upstairs in this exhibition, and there we learn about what constitutes a “genocide”, and what other genocides there have been. They could as well have installed a cold shower, or a kind of ranking of the best genocides in history, or a typical BBC feature on “all you need to know about genocides”. The whole thing is so insincere and sterile that somehow I have the impression, that the victims of the genocide are used again and their memory insulted. Again. Not that they will know, but their relatives, however many there are left, might.   

Now in our hotel, sitting down for breakfast in the morning, it takes about 45 minutes to be served the coffee, a plate of fruit, and an omelette on toast. I am told that the killing rate during the Rwandan genocide was three times higher than during the Holocaust, but I guess that I should have learned by now that some things just don’t rhyme. Maybe I should check on the Ethiopians and the ongoing slaughter of the Tigray population. Maybe not. No one else seems to be interested. But the coffee in Addis Ababa was excellent, and the service pretty speedy.