Family Resemblance

So, we spent half term in Rwanda, bowled over by family resemblances:

first with the darling toddler cousins, who look so much themselves and yet so much too like their parents, grandparents, and wider family;

second with the amazing mountain gorillas, who are just so familiar in their behaviour. So Rolfe Family sitting on the sofa, waiting for Life to happen. So boisterous 8 year old boy coming and bouncing on the stomach of his snoozing father, just because he wants the attention. So preoccupied mother checking her school age child for lice yet again, sigh.  So overladen mother staggering back from the (bamboo shoot) supermarket with enough for the tribe, without any thanks, just tuck in, why don't you. So playground mothers sitting on a drafty bench in a windswept playground keeping a wary eye on their kids and needing to heave themselves up every now and again to admonish an unruly child or cuff an ear.  We humans sure ain't no race apart.

But disturbing beyond was seeing the links with the Rwandan people.  Evidence of the 1994 genocide is everywhere. One in seven people were killed, some million people. 300,000 children. Killed at close quarters, with machetes by neighbours, by petrol bombs on crowded churches.  This happened all over - seemingly idyllic hillside villages have handpainted signs against genocide next to cemeteries of victims.  One person was killed every six minutes over a six month period.  I want to distance ourselves from those who lived with this reality. 'It couldn't happen to me ... where I live ... in my country' I think, 'Rwanda is somehow different'.  But the awful triumph of the Kigali Genocide Memorial is to explode this myth.

Alongside the context setting, the statistics, the explanation of how genocide was brought about in Rwanda, the final few rooms gave me a tiny sense of the human cost. One room displays photos of 2000 genocide victims, the last photos their families have of them, taken in happier times. First day at school, wedding photo, graduation, beaming with arms around a best friend. Celebrations, events we've all shared.  People from our generation, in colour photos, dressed in clothes we've all worn.  And in the final room, life sized photos of twelve of the children killed.  Aged seven months, smart white dress, bottle in hand; a toddler sitting on a green and red tricycle, like T&K used to have; a darling beaming shiny-cheeked five year old boy;  a gawky ten year old.  Each photo has details of the child's life: her name, his best friend, favourite food, favourite activity.  And how they were killed - dashed against a wall, burnt to death, hacked to death in mother's arms - and, where known, where witnesses survived, of their final words. 

It's simplistic, but I understood there for the first time that a million people killed is the death of a million individuals. A million individuals, each of whom had a best friend.  A child with a red trike whose head was dashed against a wall.  Children who shared experiences with our children, killed while we were preoccupied with our own lives, with everyday life in 1994.  People no different from us or from our children in the things that matter.

I fret in my head alot that 'things aren't fair'.  Who on earth am I to expect that it should be fair, when here, in Africa, evidence of just how unfair and inequitable life can be is all around.