Re Writing History And Rwandan Identity Through The Kigali...

Re-writing History and Rwandan Identity Through the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre In April 2004, the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre opened to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide. Peacefully overlooking the city of Kigali, the Centre seeks to be a place of remembrance and honor for survivors as well as a step towards creating Rwanda’s post-genocide identity. Rwanda has sought to find its place politically, socially, and in memory through this westernized approach to remembrance. The museum is comprised of the display of a permanent exhibition, a memorial garden, a small library and documentation center, and a mass grave holding over 250,000 genocide victims who were killed in and around the city of Kigali during the 1994 genocide. Although the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre is poised to be an impactful space and place for remembrance and education, I will argue that it has become a place for revisionist history and political agendas to be promoted. Before the genocide of 1994, Rwanda had been a country of great political and social turmoil. Deep seeded ethnic tensions which had plagued Rwanda since its colonization, first by Germany and then Belgium, came to a devastating and bloody genocide in April 1994 in which, over a period of approximately 100 days, between 800,000 and one million Tutsi and Hutu people were left dead. Today scholars believe that there is no actual ethnic distinction between the two people groups aside from those assigned in