Experiencing Rwanda: Understanding Mass Atrocity at Nyamata

Bentley, Michelle

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-74687-6_9

Michelle Bentley⁵

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict ((PSCHC))

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Abstract

This chapter analyzes a 360-degree virtual tour of the Nyamata Church memorial in Rwanda. The church commemorates the 1994 genocide by openly displaying the bones of the victims massacred there by Hutu militia. The act of being at and witnessing this emotive site has been transformed into an interactive online experience. This chapter assesses how representative this experience is compared to being physically present at the church and as an act of dark tourism. It concludes that, despite some limitations, the tour does much to capture the essence of the memorial. Furthermore, it identifies key educational benefits related to “teaching” the virtual participant about the atrocity that occurred.

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Notes

1.
“Rwanda: a scene from the genocide,” The Guardian, July 4, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2014/jul/04/-sp-rwanda-genocide-nyamata-liberation-day-photography (accessed August 7, 2017).
2.
Martin Edström’s website (“Marin Eström”) can be found at https://martinedstrom.com/.
3.
The figure of 5000 is disputed, but this is considered a reasonable estimate.
4.
Jean Hatzfeld , Into the Quick of Life, The Rwandan Genocide: The Survivors Speak (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2005), 4–5.
5.
Ibid., 115.
6.
Ibid.
7.
Anne Kubai, “Walking a Tightrope: Christians and Muslims in Post-Genocide Rwanda,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 18, no. 2 (2007): 226.
8.
William R Woodward and Jean-Marie VianneyHigiro, “The Commodification of Genocide: Part II, A NeoGramscian Model for Rwanda,” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science 5, no. 5 (2015): 5.
9.
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10.
Martin Edström , “How do you tell the story of a genocide?” April 7, 2014, https://blog.martinedstrom.com/2014/04/07/how-do-you-tell-about-a-genocide/ (accessed August 7, 2017).
11.
Edström, “How do you tell the story of a genocide?”
12.
“Rwanda: a scene from the genocide.”
13.
Ibid.
14.
G. Ashworth, “Tourism and the heritage of atrocity: managing the heritage of South Africa for entertainment,” in New Horizons in Tourism: Strange Experiences and Stranger Practices, ed. T. V. Singh (Wallingford: CABI, 2004), 95–108.
15.
Véronique Tadjo , The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the heart of Rwanda, trans. Véronique Wakerley (Essex: Heinemann, 2002), 15.
16.
Urther Rwafa, “Film representations of the Rwandan genocide,” African Identities 8, no. 4 (2010): 404.
17.
Peter Hall, “Reflections On A Genocide,” BMJ: British Medical Journal 309, no. 6954 (1994): 614; Pat Caplan, “‘Never Again’: Memorials in Rwanda,” Anthropology Today 23, no. 1 (2007): 21.
18.
Philip Stone and Richard Sharpley, “Consuming dark tourism: A thanatological perspective,” Annals of Tourism Research 35, no. 2 (2008): 574; Mona Freidrich and Tony Johnston, “Beauty versus tragedy: thanatourism and the memorialization of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide,” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 11, no. 4 (2013): 316.
19.
Avital Biran, Taniv Poria, and Gila Oren, “Sought Experiences at (Dark) Heritage Sites,” Annals of Tourism Research 38, no. 3 (2011): 822–823; G. J. Ashworth and Rami K. Isaac, “Have we illuminated the dark? Shifting perspectives on ‘dark’ tourism,” Tourism Recreation Research 40, no. 3 (2015): 316–325.
20.
Tony Walter, “Dark Tourism: Mediating Between the Dead and the Living,” in The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, ed. Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone (Buffalo, New York: Channel View Publications, 2009), 52.
21.
For example, Seaton and Lennon identify two main motives in reference to this: schadenfreude (the pleasure in viewing others’ misfortune) and the contemplation of death—see A. V. Seaton and J. J. Lennon , “Thanatourism in the early twenty-first century: moral panics, ulterior motives and alterior desires,” in New Horizons, ed. Singh, 63–82.
22.
Anne-Marie Hede and Maree Thyne, “A journey to the authentic: Museum visitors and their negotiation of the inauthentic,” Journal of Marketing Management 26, no. 7–8 (2010): 690.
23.
Peter Tarlow and Harold Marcuse, quoted in Philip R. Stone , “Making Absent Death Present: Consuming Dark Tourism in Contemporary Society,” in Darker Side of Travel, ed. Sharpley and Stone , 35; Eun-Jung Kang, Noel Scott, Timothy Jeonglyeol Lee, and Roy Ballantyne, “Benefits of visiting a ‘dark tourism’ site: The case of the Jeju April 3rd Peace Park, Korea,” Tourism Management 22 (2012): 262.
24.
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25.
For example, Tong-Hyun Cho, Youcheng Wang, and Daniel R. Fesenmaier, “Searching for Experiences,” Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing 12, no. 4 (2002): 1–17.
26.
Jiri Lysela and Pavla Storkova, “Using augmented reality as a medium for teaching history and tourism,” Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences 174 (2015): 926–931.
27.
J. S. P Hobson and Paul Williams, “Virtual reality and tourism: fact or fantasy?” Tourism Management 16, no. 6 (1995): 425.
28.
Philip Gourevitch , We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with our Families (New York: Picador, 1998), 19–20.
29.
Jean-Michel Dewailly, “Sustainable tourist space: From reality to virtual reality?” Tourism Geographies 1, no. 1 (1999): 49.
30.
See Caplan, “Never Again,” 20–22.
31.
Roger Cheong, “The virtual threat to travel and tourism,” Tourism Management 16, no. 6 (1995): 421.
32.
For example, Sonia Pace, “Rwanda: Scenes From a Nightmare,” Africa Report 40, no. 1 (1995): 42; Anne Kubai, “Conducting Fieldwork in Rwanda: Listening to silence and processing experiences of genocide” in Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory and Representation, ed. Ivana Macek (London: Routledge, 2014), 119–120.
33.
Andrew Blum, “Searching for Answers, and Discovering That There Are None,” The New York Times, May 1, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/travel/searching-for-answers-and-discovering-that-there-are-none.html?_r=1 (accessed August 7, 2017).
34.
Elisa Miles, “Holocaust Exhibitions On-Line: An Exploration of the Use and Potential of Virtual Space in British and American Museum Websites,” The Journal of Holocaust Education 10, no. 2 (2001): 90.
35.
Janet Jacobs, “Sacred Space and Collective Memory: Memorializing Genocide at Sites of Terror,” Sociology of Religion 72, no. 2 (2011): 154–165. Unfortunately, Jacobs does not clarify which tour this was, which limits assessment of her findings (it would not be Edström’s as Jacobs published before Edström’s site was released).
36.
Jacobs , “Sacred Space,” 161–162.
37.
Ibid, 162.
38.
Tadjo , The Shadow of Imana, 11.
39.
Anna Reading, “Digital interactivity in public memory institutions: the uses of new technologies in Holocaust museums,” Media, Culture & Society 25, no. 1 (2003): 73.
40.
Thomas P. Odom, Journey Into Darkness: Genocide in Rwanda (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005), 220–221.
41.
Daniel A. Guttentag, “Virtual reality: Applications and implications for tourism,” Tourism Management 31 (2010): 637.
42.
Walter, “Dark Tourism,” 44.
43.
Erika M. Robb, “Violence and Recreation: Vacationing in the Realm of Dark Tourism,” Anthropology and Humanism 34, no. 1 (2009): 52.
44.
Reading, “Digital interactivity,” 77.
45.
Caplan, “Never Again,” 22; Alexandre Dauge-Roth, Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda: Dismembering and Remembering the Traumatic History (Lanham: Lexington, 2010), 20; Rachel Ibreck, “International Constructions of National Memories: The Aims and Effects of Foreign Donors’ Support for Genocide Remembrance in Rwanda,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 7, no. 2 (2013): 150.
46.
Laurie Beth Clark, “Coming to Terms with Trauma Tourism,” Performance Paradigms 5, no. 2 (2009): 11; Jess M. Raiten, “Lessons of the Gacaca,” Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) 314, no. 5 (2015): 451.
47.
David Belton, When the Hills Ask For Your Blood (London: Transworld, 2014), 183.
48.
“Nyamata Church,” Lonely Planet, http://www.lonelyplanet.com/rwanda/sights/religious/nyamata-church (accessed August 7, 2017).
49.
Stephen C. Feinstein, “Destruction has no covering: artists and the Rwandan genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 1 (2005): 32.
50.
Frank Moeller, “Rwanda Revisualized: Genocide, Photography, and the Era of the Witness,” Alternatives 35 (2010): 115–116.
51.
Dominik Schaller, “From the Editors: genocide tourism—educational value or voyeurism?” Journal of Genocide Research 9, no. 4 (2007): 514–515.
52.
James Dawes, That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1.
53.
Michael C. Montesano, “Preemptive Testimony: Literature as Witness to Genocide in Rwanda,” African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review 5, no. 1 (2015): 93.
54.
Susan Moeller , Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (New York: Routledge, 1999).
55.
Richard Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004), 93–123.
56.
Michael Grosspietsch, “Perceived and projected images of Rwanda: visitor and international tour operator perspectives,” Tourism Management 27 (2006): 225.
57.
Elizabeth Anstett, “The museography of disaster: Museums faced with the material traces of extreme violence,” African Yearbook of Rhetoric 6, no. 1 (2015): 56.
58.
Guttentag, “Virtual reality,” 642.
59.
Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and the Post-Socialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
60.
Richard Sharpley “Shedding Light on Dark Tourism,” Darker Side of Travel, ed. Sharpley and Stone, 8.
61.
Jonas Schild, Joseph LaViola, Maic Masuch, “Understanding user experience in stereoscopic 3D games,” Proceedings of the SIGHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2012): 89–98.
62.
Andrew Williams, “Reality Check [Consumer Electronicsvirtual Reality 3D],” Engineering and Technology 10, no. 2 (2015): 52–55.

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Royal Holloway-University of London, Egham, UK
Michelle Bentley

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Michelle Bentley
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Department of History, Marietta College, Marietta, OH, USA
Kathryn N. McDaniel

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Bentley, M. (2018). Experiencing Rwanda: Understanding Mass Atrocity at Nyamata. In: McDaniel, K.N. (eds) Virtual Dark Tourism. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74687-6_9

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74687-6_9
Published: 24 April 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-74686-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-74687-6
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