Day 13: Travel and the Bisesero Genocide Memorial

Long day of driving on unpaved roads, broken by one of the hardest memorial visits of the trip. Route to Lake Kivu took us through Bisesero. We stopped.

Getting to Bisesero

The drive itself was its own thing. Long stretches of unpaved road winding through the hills. The kind of road where you hold on to whatever's nearby and accept that it's going to take a while. Rwanda is not large by square mileage, but the terrain means distances take longer than you'd expect. The views along the way were striking — rolling green hills in every direction, terraced farming on the slopes, small villages tucked into the valleys.

The Bisesero Memorial

The memorial was still under construction when we visited. What was already there was enough.

Bisesero is where approximately 50,000 people fled to the hills during the genocide, looking for refuge in the high terrain. The men among them tried to defend the group — spears, stones, whatever they could find. They held out longer than almost anyone else in the country. They were ultimately overwhelmed. The resistance at Bisesero is one of the significant stories of the genocide, and reading about it in an academic context is a different thing from standing on the hill where it happened.

There was a tin shed on the grounds containing the skulls and bones of 1,040 identified victims. The remains were arranged in coffins, some holding as many as 50 skeletons each. That is a small fraction of the 50,000 who died here. The plan, our guide explained, was to eventually consolidate all the victims into permanent memorial structures. That work was ongoing.

We've visited several memorial sites on this trip now. Each one hits differently. Bisesero felt remote and exposed — high in the hills, wind moving through the grass, nothing blocking the open sky. Fifty thousand people came to these hills because they believed the terrain would help protect them. For a time, it did. And then it didn't.

On to Lake Kivu

After the memorial, we continued to our accommodation on Lake Kivu. The contrast between the weight of what we'd just seen and the beauty of the lake in front of us was jarring. That contrast keeps coming up on this trip. Rwanda holds the terrible and the beautiful in the same space and doesn't try to resolve that tension. It just holds both.

Heavy day. Glad we stopped at Bisesero. These places matter. The stories told there matter.