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Dark Tourism, Difficult Heritage, and Memorialisation: A Case of the Rwandan Genocide

First Online: 21 February 2018

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Mona Friedrich 6 ,
Philip R. Stone 7 &
Paul Rukesha 8

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15 Citations

The International Handbook on Tourism and Peace offers an optimistic foreword in which the global tourism industry is described as:

[a] worldwide social and cultural phenomenon that engages people of all nations as both hosts and guests, [generating] … connections, [which] spur dialogue and exchange, break down cultural barriers and promote values of tolerance, mutual understanding and respect. In a world constantly struggling for harmonious coexistence, these values espoused by tourism could be integral to building a more peaceful future. (Rifai, 2014)

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Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany

Mona Friedrich

University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK

Philip R. Stone

Aegis Trust, Kigali Genocide Memorial, Kigali, Rwanda

Paul Rukesha

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University of Colorado Denver, Denver, USA

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Friedrich, M., Stone, P.R., Rukesha, P. (2018). Dark Tourism, Difficult Heritage, and Memorialisation: A Case of the Rwandan Genocide. In: R. Stone, P., Hartmann, R., Seaton, T., Sharpley, R., White, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47566-4_11

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Published : 21 February 2018

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, London

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Dark Tourism – Visit Rwanda’s Genocide Memorials

Most Rwanda safaris start and end in Kigali a home to one of the most visited Rwanda genocide site –Kigali genocide memorial and tourists make it a point to stopover in memory of the Rwanda brothers and sisters who perished in just a period of 100 days either at the beginning of their Rwanda tours or at the end. It’s a great experience when one gets to the Rwanda early and is looking at starting a scheduled adventure the next morning, besides it’s a no time activity for both morning and afternoon without exceeding 4.00pm the closing time. Hundreds visit different Rwanda genocide sites but few visit Murambi because the remains of the victims still look fresh and scare a lot. The 1994 human slaughter incident claimed lives of thousands into more than the eight Rwanda genocide memorials found in different locations of the country.

Despite the past Rwanda is the safest country in Africa with variety to explore and enjoy in the world of travel. Millions come from all over the globe to discover the countries attractions including mountain gorillas, chimpanzees, golden monkeys, forests, lakes, mountains, landscape etc. While in Rwanda tourists enjoy connecting to neighboring countries for other tour holidays. Tracking low land gorillas, the unique chimpanzees and also climbing the live volcanoes, Nyinamulagira and Nyiragongo are the most desired in Congo while gorilla tracking, wildlife viewing, viewing might falls, white water rafting , bungee jumping are the reasons as to why Uganda some explore Uganda as well. It’s not a wasting time to do same tour activity in two different countries because the experience can never be the same. If not contented try asking tourists who enjoy tracking mountain gorillas in Rwanda & Uganda or Rwanda and Congo or Uganda and Congo.

Travellers to Rwanda end or start and end with a visit to at least one of the genocide site as a way of respecting the culture of the country visited. it’s sad but the experience is worthy because looking at the traditionally preserved remains of victims shoe you the situation in which they were killed in for example the woman whose one arm is in the face and others off a true sign of defense and some have cracks on skulls a thing which portrays brutal murder with no mercy. Remains where collected in different rooms and as the survivors open for you different preserved remain sections for a glance. No camera or video is allowed inside any memorial and entrance is free.

Many hold grapes as they visit different sections of the memorials because the silence and remain displays break travellers and others end up seeing tear drops rolling out of their eyes due to mercy and sympathy of the victims. With the tight schedules and the many attractions you intend to visit while in Rwanda spare a minute for our brothers and sisters who perished for no reason. However who visits the one of the Rwanda genocide memorial learns to live in peace and also respect the life of fellow humans. Though no fee is required but a giving heart receives even more.

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Dark Tourism Difficult Heritage and Memorialisation A Case of the Rwandan Genocide20190826 80614 xv6zk6

2018, Dark Tourism, Difficult Heritage, and Memorialisation: A Case of the Rwandan Genocide

This paper examines the perceptions and interpretations of local and international visitors in response to several national genocide memorial sites in Rwanda. We illustrate visitor experiences among groups of diverse backgrounds and at different sites of remembrance, looking particularly at i) whether such visits foster an individual sense of empathy, as well as a universal understanding of responsibility towards the prevention of atrocity crimes in the future, and ii) whether and in what ways visitor experiences add to the process of post-traumatic growth and social cohesion among Rwandans. The paper also examines the controversy surrounding the term 'dark tourism', displaying the case of increasing tourism development at Rwanda's genocide memorials as a complex example of this phenomenon, which may play a role in wider societal processes within and outside of the country. Built on semi-structured interviews with local and international visitors, as well as participant observation at various national memorial sites, the study outlines implications for the management of, particularly Rwanda's, 'darkest' memory and its complex relationship to peacebuilding work in general.

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Lies Verlinden

This dissertation discusses two transitional justice and reconciliation mechanisms: forensic archaeology, its techniques, its application and its importance for international tribunals like the ICTY and the ICTR, and memorialization efforts and their impact on the community. Both aspects are explained from a general view, providing a theoretical framework that can be applied to the case study of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. There have only been two forensic excavations in Rwanda. The vast majority of efforts to recover the remains of victims of the genocide, have been non-scientific and driven from different actors (governmental and non-governmental, like relatives and survivors). Over the years, the exhumations and the reburials became more centralized and overseen by a central government committee, the National Committee for the Fight against Genocide (CNLG). Using the framework by Cook (2004), there are many different memorialization activities to be noticed at genocide locations in Rwanda: preservation and restoration, memorialization and commemoration, and documentation and research. These have a different meaning to the different stakeholders involved in the memorialization process: the relatives and friends, the survivor communities and NGOs, the government and its national genocide narrative, perpetrators or bystanders and dark tourists. It becomes clear that the national discourse is in reality a dissonant heritage issue, that is gradually evolving towards a more peaceful approach, willing to make the genocide at thing of the past.

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In this article, we demonstrate how the digital sphere and individual contributions within it add to a process of worldmaking by creating a new transnational moral order that reinforces notions of a transnational humanity and shared values. Specifically, tourists’ interactions in the digital sphere create a new moral space—in our analysis on the internet platform TripAdvisor.com—where they comment on their particular experience when visiting memorial sites of atrocities such as mass violence or genocide. This article contributes to approaches that see dark tourism not in terms of voyeurism or amorality but instead as a constituent part of moral meaning-making in individuals’ experiences of post-genocide spaces, expanding these arguments from the material visits of the tourists to their discussions in the digital sphere. This is affected by—yet at the same time contributes to and thus perpetuates—the transnationalisation of memory by which the way we remember and commemorate is increasingly becoming similar on a global scale. This transnationalisation is both forwarded by and constitutive of the digital sphere in which we study it. Empirically, this article draws on visitor reviews that were posted on the travel website TripAdvisor regarding the dark tourism sites Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and Kigali Genocide Memorial in Kigali, Rwanda, expanding our understanding of responses to these memorial sites into the digital sphere.

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Peacebuilding in post-conflict societies increasingly encompasses memorialisation and practices of remembrance. Memorials that commemorate incidents of mass atrocity have been claimed as spaces for intervention by outside actors, and international support has often been decisive for their creation. While external involvement is driven by a desire for solid statements about the violent past, it is increasingly recognised that memorials are on the contrary sites for the ongoing production of meaning in the present; sites used both for mourning and for making politics. This article interrogates the productive encounter between external actors' globalised template for remembering and desire, and local processes of remembrance. The argument is illustrated by cases studies of the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda.

Richard S A Newell

The response from the survivor communities to the acts of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia was to create memorial institutions. These memorials had two purposes; to house and commemorate the dead, and; to contribute to the healing of their respective societies, preventing a possible return to genocide. This thesis examines how they deliver on these two purposes. To perform this analysis, several theoretical concepts had to be established, to provide clarity to what these purposes actually comprise. Following this is a practical examination of how they achieve these goals (the first of its kind to be written). The data for this research was generated via a research method known as Process Tracing and employed a form of the Biographical Semi-Structured Interview as the means to collect the data, which was subsequently compared across a series of matrices, via a Comparative Analysis Method. The data allowed us to understand how successfully the Memorials are achieving their aims, and performing in comparison to each other, identifying strengths and weaknesses. The conclusions will provide a summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the individual memorials’ approaches, and in the final analysis, present some thoughts on how they might be supported.

Journal of Modern African Studies

Gretchen Baldwin

In the years following Rwanda’s civil war, the country has remembered those killed in the 1994 genocide with 100 days of official commemoration, known as Kwibuka. The temporary commemoration period is characterised by an explicit acknowledgement and public discussion of ethnic identity, which stands in puzzling contrast to the state’s policy of ethnic non-recognition, enforced during the rest of the year in hopes of achieving national homogeneity (Ndi Umunyarwanda). Thus, one observes seemingly diametrically opposed practices of legally erasing identity groups because of their link to conflict and a unique, three month-long saturation of reminders in the form of public speeches, memorial programming and burials, and commemorative signage. A blurring of ‘Tutsi’ with ‘survivor’ and the deliberate passing down of survivor identity to Tutsi youth have created, over time, conditions for a ‘survivor nationalism’, which exacerbates social tensions and risks sustainable peace in the long term.

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Susanne Buckley-Zistel

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Few scholars analyze the problem of national meaning-making after mass atrocities. Whether the leaders in power after atrocity were perpetrators or not, they must simultaneously make sense of a tragic past while ruling through state institutions likely implicated in those mass atrocities. This sense-making dilemma leads to “salvific discourses”: narratives founded through memorialization of the victims of mass atrocities which produce an ongoing mythic conflict between saviors and villains that only enduring authoritarianism can contain. Analyzing “post-genocide” Rwanda, we exhume how Rwandan genocide memorials shape the remembrance of the dead and of the genocide within Rwanda. Genocide memorials, as a form of public anamnestic reasoning, create the myth of the genocidal Hutu nation by establishing the “facts” of the genocide as well as specific histories and interpretive frames for those “facts.” The facts and frames combine into “salvific discourses” justifying the practices of authoritarian rule of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)- regime: mass Hutu incarceration in the context of discredited domestic and international pressures for mass electoral participation. In other words, these memorials generate a discourse that simultaneously criminalizes all Hutu males and indicts Catholic Churches as complicit, while paradoxically positing foreign Tutsi governance as post-ethnic, salvific, and cleansing.

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