prisoners in pink

In the summer of 2007, while living and interning with a small women’s NGO in Kigali, Rwanda, I did my best to avoid memorial sites. I felt that the proof of the genocide was present enough in the eyes of its survivors. However, on a day-trip to Gikongoro, I visited the Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre. Murambi was a new technical school still under construction in 1994¹. The guide at the memorial explained how Tutsis had been invited to this site to escape the deadly chaos of the genocide, until local officials called upon the interahamwe², who in turn slaughtered, over the course of 4 days, 60,000 individuals³. To read these words or even to hear them spoken aloud in no way prepares you for the cold and unmoving evidence we saw as we walked through the bungalows and our guide slowly and silently opened the doors to classrooms filled with skeletons. The bones alone held the tension of terror in their positions. Although our guide unlocked ten or more rooms, I only looked in the first. Before I had the sense to look away, I unwillingly memorized one of the tiniest skeletons. The child couldn’t have been more than a year or two old yet 15 years later he was still clinging to his mother.

Leaving the Murambi site, I had to walk a mile up a dirt road back to the bus stop and while taking in the scenery and attempting to shake that last image from my mind, I passed a group of prisoners dressed, as usual in their light pink jumpsuits. These men were on their way to do some kind of manual labor, carrying hoes that, in the right context are reminiscent of machetes. Walking past them, my eye contact with each one grew increasingly uneasy, as I realized the probable connection between these genocidaires, linked and chained, and the skeletons of the Murambi Memorial⁴.