Abstract
This chapter explores some of Rwanda’s numerous genocide memorials and the related debates about the politicization of commemorative practices in the country. In particular, it focuses on the Kigali Genocide Memorial and the way in which it employs the private, personal and family photographic archives (images taken before the genocide) in one of its exhibits. The chapter examines how the images are both reduced and enriched by the context of their exhibition. It investigates their dual memorial and evidentiary functions as personal mementos and museum exhibits and engages with what they can tell us about the relationship between photography and death, time, collective memory, aesthetics and the act of looking. The specificity of the memorial and museum context is considered alongside the unique, dialogical memorial and evidentiary fluidity offered by the photographs.
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Notes
- 1.
The majority of Rwanda’s memorials are situated where massacres took place.
- 2.
Mugenzira died in 2013. He also appears in Keepers of Memory (2004), analysed in Chapter 5.
- 3.
- 4.
IBUKA is an umbrella organization of survivors’ associations.
- 5.
All of Ahishakiye’s views are expressed in his capacity as the Executive Secretary of IBUKA—as such they should not be taken to represent the views of all survivors.
- 6.
AVEGA is the association of genocide widows.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
For an insightful analysis of the concept see Whitehead (2009: 139–147).
- 10.
While this was indeed the case for a relatively long time, since recently, Murambi also has a visitor centre with an exhibition providing historical context to the genocide and its aftermath. In terms of contents and appearance, the exhibition at Murambi is very similar (if less expansive) to that displayed at the KGM.
- 11.
The Aegis Trust is a UK-based NGO. Its main activities consist in campaigning for the prevention of genocide around the world and supporting the process of commemorating and remembering past occurrences of mass slaughter. For more details see www.aegistrust.org. Aegis Rwanda (a subsidiary of Aegis Trust) runs most of the Trust’s Rwandan projects, including the Genocide Archive.
- 12.
- 13.
The physical archive is housed in a professionally equipped room at the KGM but all the digital operations are conducted from an office in central Kigali, shared with Aegis Rwanda.
- 14.
Scholars such as Ibreck point to the significance of the fact that the panels were produced and, crucially, written outside of Rwanda (Ibreck, 2013: 157).
- 15.
Particularly noteworthy, in the section called ‘genocide’, is a screen displaying a video of footage of bodies by the road and in a church, bodies retrieved from marshes, survivors showing their relatively fresh wounds, machetes, Nick Hughes’s footage and decomposing bodies that lasts about 1.5 minutes and plays on loop.
- 16.
The neatness of these displays stands in contrast to the displays of clothes and remains in places such as Murambi and Ntarama.
- 17.
What I mean by simplified here is that the clothes have been arranged into body shapes, the bones grouped together and neatly stacked. The chaos, the mess of a massacre is absent.
- 18.
Some are fixed to black cardboard sheets.
- 19.
I will refer to these personal archive photographs in the room at KGM as Gisozi images from now on. Beyond providing clarity, this is also motivated by the fact that the KGM is commonly referred to in Kigali as Gisozi (its official name until recently being the Gisozi Memorial Centre).
- 20.
At the time of the interview, in 2009, Kamuronsi was the Director of the Information Centre.
- 21.
Except for video testimony which is still being collected—a process I describe in Chapter 5.
- 22.
The adoption of the practice of attempting to individualize victims through photographic displays writes itself into the wider debate mentioned above about the extent to which the curation of the memory of the Holocaust influences, or dominates, institutional memory-making in Rwanda, especially that supported by Aegis.
- 23.
This is confirmed by the size of the Genocide Archive which holds around 75,000 images related to the genocide (Irakoze, pers. comm.). The portraits of genocide victims constitute a relatively small part of the photographic archive – between 6,000 and 8,000. This number doesn’t include some personal images donated to IBUKA and other memorials which are not accompanied by a release and consent form – and as such cannot be used in the exhibition or online. There are images in the Archive whose provenance remains unknown, just like the people in them.
- 24.
It should be noted that the accounts about image donation included here come solely from representatives of IBUKA, the KGM and the Genocide Archive. Important and urgent work is yet to be carried out about the process of donation from the survivor/family members’ perspective. What would be particularly fascinating to find out is what is the importance (if any) associated with the giving up of the original or agreeing to have an image displayed at the KGM or, as is happening with an increasing number of images, online.
- 25.
The ubiquity of wedding and baptism photographs in the Genocide Archive and, more generally, in Rwandan homes is significant. These images often show groups of people and would have been kept in more than one household; multiple copies would be available. After the genocide, people would often turn to the members of their extended families to check whether a photograph of their perished loved ones from one of these occasions happened to be available. Often, these photographs are the only existing images of the victims.
- 26.
This assumption is, of course, just conjecture. It is based on my aesthetic reading of the image and inevitably lacks information about any emotive or memorial preference of an individual that could very well render the image the most important document or keepsake from that particular occasion.
- 27.
The fact that I seem to be looking at a Zairean rather than a Rwandan national is something that I acknowledge in my viewing but mostly in that it serves to underscore my inability to know the details of what and whom I am really looking at.
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Cieplak, P. (2017). Chapter 3: Images of Before: Personal Archives and the Kigali Genocide Memorial. In: Death, Image, Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57988-1_4
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