Ntarama
The Ntarama memorial consists of three heavily damaged buildings. Large metal canopies protect the buildings from rain and other environemental damage. A tour guide assigned by the National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide leads visitors on a tour of the church sanctuary and Sunday school building. A survivor who is hired as a caretaker also oversees the site. Both times I visited the site she answered questions on how the interahamwe attacked them, where people died, and where bodies were recovered. Her husband and children rest anonymously amongst the dead.
Inside the church building rests a three-shelf bone display of skull and femurs. Nearby indentations in the ground indicate where grenades thrown by the interahamwe landed.
The perpetrators threw grenades and sprayed bullets into the church. Afterwards they entered and killed survivors with machetes. A few lucky Tutsi fled the church during the grenade attacks and escaped into the nearby forest. Others were caught by the interahamwe and killed. The memorial attempts to preserve the evidence of these crimes. For instance, Ntarama preserves the broken stain-glass windows and the holes in the building from these attacks. At one stain-glass window adjacent to the church altar, the church's cross rested just under an undamaged pane of glass. Bullet holes can also be viewed on the ceiling.
The preserved clothing of victims drapes the inner walls of the church. This number of clothes expresses just how many people died in the small church.
Shelves of coffins and other artifacts surround the church's altar. Remains that can be identified are put into marked coffins that rest in the church's pews. Compared to the amount of people who died, they are very few.
mages of Christianity dominate both the Ntarama and Nyamata memorials. At Ntarama, rosaries of victims are displayed on a shelf next to the altar. Remnants of a Crucifixion mural is still visible on the back wall of the church. In a storage room, the Sunday schoolbooks of children rest on a shelf. These items remind the visitor of the presence (and absence) of Christianity at the massacre site. A heavily Christian nation, countless Tutsi died praying for safety. Others prayed for a quick and painless death. These symbols have been the source of a scholarly critique over the role of the sacred in memorialization.
The most grisly image at Ntarama occurs when the tour stops at the Sunday school building. Hutu perpetrators smashed the skulls of hiding children against a brick wall. The memorial uses product to preserve the brain matter and blood stains from these attacks. Additionally, the memorial frames the memories of sexual violence next to the brick wall by placing a stick used to violate Tutsi women. Messages left by Rwandan schoolchildren commemoration are also displayed on the same wall. By preserving these memories of victimization, the memorial makes a rather visible effort to disturb and traumatize its visitors.
Unlike at most museum exhibitions, no display case separates the visitor from the artifact. At Ntarama, the visitor can walk right up to the crowded shelves of skulls and bones. Resting inside the church opposite the church altar, the bone display seems at odds with the building's previous functiona as a peaceful place of worship.
In the early 1930s the colonial state began issuing identity cards indicating who was Tutsi, Twa, and Hutu. The post-independence Hutu government adopted the identification card practice. During the genocide possession of a Tutsi I.D. card was effectively a death sentence. At Ntarama the tour displays decomposing I.D. cards of victims.
Prior to 1994, Tutsi fled to local churches for sanctuary during previous pogroms. But in 1994 Hutu extremists utilized this practice to their advantage. Hutu politicians encouraged Tutsi to seek sanctuary in churches and sent the interahamwe in after them. This occurred in the Nyamata sector at both the Ntarama and Nyamata church. After the genocide, many survivors and government officials believed that preservation was necessary in order to show the international community what happened. Ntarama was the first national memorial established after the genocide.