A wet an sombre day in Rwanda

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We left the truck at our camping spot on the outskirts of town and headed in to Kigali to visit the Genocide museum. I’m sorry to say it is the #1 thing to do and unfortunately Kigali doesn’t have too much more to offer other than hills and muddy tracks.

The museum itself is very well done and simply put horrifying. Since this blog is aimed at my boys, a quick overview of what happened in Rwanda in 1994…

…Rwanda was a German colony in the early 1900s but after World War I became Belgian. The Belgians wanted to create an elite class they coul work with and incentivise to run the country for them. So they said anybody with more than 10 cows was a Tutsi and everyone else was Hutu. Over a period of time tensions grew between the “haves” (i.e. Tutsi) and “have nots” (i.e. Hutu). However for the most part they all lived side by side because the term had nothing to do with their tribe but simply a badge put upon their families many years back. Anyway eventually the Hutus (the “have nots”) were in power and over time built a hatred of the Tutsi to the point that the murder of the President triggered a massive wave of killings of the Tutsi people. Approximately 1 million people were killed in 100 days out of a population of 8 million. They particularly focused on killing women and children to prevent future generations rising up. Thankfully it was stopped and everyone now lives in peace side by side but you can imagine the horrors it left behind.

The museum was very helpful in explaining the build-up, the genocide itself and all its atrocities and how they eventually reconciled. Fittingly as we left the museum it absolutely poured with rain and to be fair it hasn’t stopped since.

Since it was raining and Kigali hadn’t got too many attractions to keep us we got in the car and headed through the endless rolling green fertile hills of Rwanda toward the border with Tanzania.

We’re currently at a nice (ish) hotel near the border. We’ve done all the research we can about getting across Northern Tanzania down toward Zambia but we’re reasonably worried we are going to have some pretty terrible roads for the next 3-4 days so fingers crossed.

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