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By Root 637 0

night, when it’s too dark to get a sense of the place. At sunrise, on the ride back to the airport to catch my plane to Rwanda, I notice that beyond the stretch of modern office buildings, hotels, and high-end car dealerships lining the main road, there’s a scattering of windswept trees. I decide I love Africa. The feeling builds as the plane takes off and cruises above long stretches of Kenyan and Tanzanian savannah, rolling red hills, and the stunning Lake Victoria, which stretches out like an ocean. When we’re flying over it, there’s only water visible in all directions. I’m shamelessly excited. I scan to see if the other passengers share my enthusiasm. It’s all I can do to not squeal with delight to everyone in the plane, “We’re in Africa!”

Instead, I peel myself away from the window and read the Lonely Planet guide to Rwanda, tagging pages that describe the genocide memorials I hope to visit, refreshing my memory and filling in the gaps by reading the history section. Rwanda is a fitting place to begin my journey because the war in Congo began with the 1994 genocide there.

For hundreds of years, Rwanda has been comprised of three ethnic groups: Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa. Historically, these ethnic lines were loose, and intermarriage was common. But Belgian colonists wanted ethnicity in writing. They measured people’s noses, counted their livestock, and issued ethnic identification cards accordingly, grooming Tutsis to be the ruling class, despite their minority status. There were several outbursts of major ethnic violence over the course of the twentieth century, but tension reached an all-time high in 1994. When the plane carrying Rwanda’s Hutu president was shot down that April, Hutu extremists vowed to kill all the “cockroaches,” as they called Tutsis, igniting a four-month bloodbath. Hutu extremists, known as Interahamwe, slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The international community did not intervene.

It was ultimately a Tutsi-led rebel army that secured the country in July 1994 and ended the genocide. When the Tutsis took over the government of Rwanda, two million refugees flooded over the border into what was then known as Zaire (and is today known as the Demoratic Republic of the Congo). Among them were countless thousands of Interahamwe—Hutu genocidaires—who found safe harbor by melting into refugee camps that were facilitated by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR). While regret-steeped aid dollars from around the world poured in to rebuild Rwanda, no effort was made to identify—and bring to justice—the thousands of Interahamwe hiding in Congo’s refugee camps.

They soon became the catalyst for Africa’s World War.

AS THE PLANE DESCENDS, we see the landscape: lush, rolling hills dotted with a patchwork of postage stamp-size farms, clay huts, tin roofs, and banana plantations.

Rwanda is beautiful. The city of Kigali rolls out across steep hills. Its roads are lined with flowering trees and filled with orderly traffic. Everything seems in good repair. The 1994 genocide seems incomprehensible.

Though I don’t stay at the InterContinental, a.k.a. Hotel Rwanda, my hotel is a lovely four-star place with gift shops and terraced gardens; it’s filled with African dignitaries and European businesspeople.

I want to visit the genocide memorial schools, where bodies and bones are still on display, or the churches, where all the personal effects of those killed have been left exactly as they were at the time of the massacre.

After settling in, I hire a taxi to go to the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center, abandoning hopes of visiting the churches after the driver quotes a $200 fare for a two-hour drive. We pull up to a large cement building that’s surrounded by linear pathways and gardens. The memorial center was built on top of a mass grave that holds more than 250,000 genocide victims. Massive cement slabs run across the front; a metal opening allows visitors to peek inside at coffins decorated with crosses piled on top of each other. A couple of floral arrangements wrapped with bows and