Mahmood Mamdani, Africa is a Country
I visited Rwanda roughly a year
after the genocide. On July 22, 1995, I went to Ntarama, about an hour and a
half by car from Kigali, on a dirt road going south toward the Burundi border.
We arrived at a village church, made of brick and covered with iron sheets.
Outside there was a wood and bamboo rack, bearing skulls. On the ground were
assorted bones, collected and pressed together inside sacks, but sticking out
of their torn cloth. The guard explained that the bones had been gathered from
the neighborhood. A veteran of similar sites in the Luwero Triangle in Uganda
roughly a decade ago, I felt a sense of déjá vu. Even if the numbers of skulls
and sacks were greater in quantity than I had ever seen at any one site, I was
not new to witnessing the artifacts of political violence.
