Nyamata
Located near the Ntarama memorial, the Nyamata church tell an equally tragic story. Community leaders encouraged Tutsi to flee to the church, only to organize an attack participated by local militias with army support. The current memorial preserves the site damage, the victims' clothing, and bones. In addition, the site honors victims of sexual violence. Like Ntarama, Nyamata juxtaposes the sacredness of the church with the horror and violence of the massacres. Scholar Janet Jacobs writes of the artifacts preserved at Nyamata, "[in] thier realism and authenticity, they construct a separate sphere of remembrance where the sacred and profane co-exist." [1] For many visitors Nyamata becomes not only a duty to "witness" the atrocity but also a religious experience.
[1] Janet Jacobs, "Sacred Space and Collective Memory: Memorializing Genocide at Stites of terror," Sociology of Religion 72, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 163.
The Nyamata national memorial is located just off the main road in Nyamata town, Bugesera.
Visitors enter Nyamata through the badly damaged steel door to the sanctuary. Hutu militiamen blew open the door with grenades in order to attack the refugees. Visitors also notice blood stains and bullet holes on the ceiling, walls, and the Virgin Mary statue.
Nyamata is a much larger church than Ntarama. The pews are completely covered with victims' clothes. This presentation illustrates just how many people died in the church.
The Nyamata memorial displays recovered religious and secular artifacts at the church's altar. These artifacts include crosses, rosaries, I.D. cards, machetes, and pipes.
After visiting the sanctuary, the tour descends into a memorial chamber dug into the sanctuary's floor. A single coffin rests below. In the coffin lies a women who was raped and violated repeatedly during the massacre.
After exiting the church, the tour takes the visitor behind the church to the mass crypts. Visitors walk through the crypts, viewing shelves upon shelves of bones and coffins of identified remains.
The visitor can often see how the individual victim died. Many skulls contain damage inflicted by a machete, spear, or bullet entry.
Every year new mass graves are uncovered in the Nyamata area. Those located near the Nyamata memorial are afterwards reburied in the memorial's mass crypts. The memorial is also a gathering site for survivors and government officials during commemoration week.