Dark tourism and Rwandan media industries: Promoting nation and the mythology of memory

A brief history

The conflict in Rwanda has its roots in ethnic divisions fomented over the course of the twentieth century between the two primary ethnic groups in Rwanda: the Hutu and Tutsi. Research has shown the complex formation of Rwandan ethnic identity as fluid through the precolonial period (Mamdani, 2001; Mushikiwabo and Kramer, 2006) and its racialization and institutionalization during the colonial period (Hohenhaus, 2013). Over the course of the twentieth century, Rwandan politics shifted from a minority led Tutsi government to the eventual emergence of a Hutu ruling class, culminating in the 1959 Rwandan Revolution in which hundreds of Tutsis died, and approximately 336,000 fled into neighboring countries (Prunier, 1995: 62). Many of these refugees formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which acted as a Tutsi military government in exile inside of Uganda, often surging across the Rwandan border to skirmish within Hutu government forces.

Following decades of conflict between the RPF and Rwandan forces the United Nations (UN) pushed for the Arusha Peace Accords, meant to establish a transitional government that would reintegrate much of the RPF back into Rwanda. Anti-Tutsi sentiments within Rwanda were at an all-time high, as “Hutu Power” elements in the media spoke out against moderates and anyone that rejected the notion that “Tutsi were an enemy deserving of death” (Ndahiro, 2014). The assassination of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994, served as justification for the all-out extermination of Tutsi, with radio stations immediately calling for the extermination of what they called inyenzi, or “cockroaches” (Smith, 2003). The resulting violence targeted Tutsis, moderate Hutus, and even killed almost 30% of the third ethnic group, the Twa (Lewis and Knight, 1995: 93).

UNAMIR forces stationed in Rwanda were largely ineffective as Rwandan military, police, militias, and death squads killed Rwandans in their homes, at roadblocks, in churches, fields, and a wide range of other public spaces. RPF forces intervened and managed, over the course of a few months, to push out the Rwandan military. Over the first 100 days of the conflict, the genocide claimed approximately 800,000 lives (BBC, 2011). Yet, what happened in Rwanda was part of a larger regional conflict that didn’t end with RPF victory in 1994. Instead, its ripples were felt across the Great Lakes region (what Prunier, 2009 refers to as “Africa’s World War”).

Though a Hutu government did form in exile, within Rwanda, the RPF led government stabilized conditions on the ground. What happened next is up for debate, with prominent scholars, journalists, and diplomats disagreeing on the details. Gérard Prunier and Alison Des Forges (1999) (based to some degree on the controversial Gersony Report to the United Nations) have outlined evidence of a range of attacks by RPF forces on civilians after the end of the war, including numerous incidents in which entire villages would be called to meetings with the RPF and then killed (leading “the population to joke with typical gallows humor that kwitaba inama [“answer the call to a meeting”] was in fact kwitaba imana [“answer the call of God”]) (Prunier, 2009: 16, 17). Whether these examples are accurate or, as others have suggested, the result of attempts by Hutu nationalists to increase fear and mistrust among repatriated Rwandans, they remain important reminders that for Rwandans living in these communities, sites of genocide, and violence (whether concrete encounters with death, or imaginary experiences driven by innuendo) are all around them. The perception has been that the stabilization of Rwanda is paramount, to the point that “short of an attempted second genocide, limited killings were all right” (Prunier, 2009: 31).

In such a context, the Rwandan government has worked very hard in forming a clear and coherent national identity/imaginary in which memory serves as a foundation upon which to build a post ethnic future. But what about disavowed memories, such as the Prunier examples above? How do we memorialize the dead when they don’t conform to the transmediated narrative of the post genocidal state?

Methodology

This project focuses on three primary methodological approaches, with an eye toward data triangulation using “multiple perspectives to interpret a single set of data” (Decrop, 1999: 160). These include conversational interviews with memorial stakeholders (both on site and remotely), observational tours of memorial sites and a discursive analysis of reconciliatory language in Rwandan media.

Between November 2007 and February 2015, a series of interviews were completed with 20 stakeholders in the Rwandan tourism industry including genocide memorial workers, local residents, representatives of the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, the Minister of Youth, Culture and Sports, and Rwandan filmmakers (among others). These were completed as part of a documentary film project, where participants were asked a series of questions around forgiveness and identity in the post-genocide period. Specific questions included asking how their jobs related to their personal perspectives on forgiveness, social reconciliation, as well as the role that social spaces and places play in this process. These responses were recorded on video, then transcribed by hand into a spreadsheet for the purposes of qualitative and quantitative analysis (looking for repeated terminology usage).

Participants were selected using convenience non-probability sampling with an eye toward getting a range of perspectives on reconciliation and memorialization in Rwanda (as opposed to a representative and proportional sample). Since the interviewees perspectives and roles differed greatly, a particular focus was placed on terminology, topics, or perspectives that were shared by all of them (in this instance, reconciliatory phrase usage).

In support of these interviews, this research incorporates numerous details from a range of observational tours of genocide sites in, and around, Kigali, Rwanda completed in November 2007. These visits were documented on video and handwritten notes, and sites were analyzed on their layout, esthetic disposition, ideological/didactic qualities, and the kinds of tourism experiences they conveyed. For example, the national memorial is a standalone complex, purpose built to serve as a museum. The space is quite regimented in its layout, housing different “wings” of genocide history that offer a somewhat chronological, highly curated series of exhibits for visitors in a relatively sterile environment designed to clearly reinforce governmental narratives regarding the events of 1994 (including references to in signage to “genocide against the Tutsi”). While there are human remains housed on site, they are primarily set in caskets out of direct view.

This is quite different from the Ntarama Memorial outside of Kigali, which was church space that now serves as a memorial site. These buildings still bear the marks of the events of 1994, and visitors enter up a dirt path that leads to the memorial grounds. Inside the main building, the original wooden pews remain, but the belongings of those that were killed there, including clothing, schoolbooks, and skeletal remains, are carefully located throughout the interior. Unlike the national memorial, which relies on placards and digital screens to tell the story of the genocide, the Ntarama memorial leaves visitors to piece together their own understanding of the events that took place with the help of a memorial “guardian”/guide who helps to contextualize the experience. Of course, guardians work using carefully curated scripts that enunciate critical themes of the genocide, but post-ethnic governmental narratives are much less pronounced in this context (and there is more room for guardians to deviate from such narratives).

Sites for this research were selected as a representative sampling of urban/rural, official state run/less regimented public memorial spaces—but they all constitute an unofficial thanatourism circuit. During these visits, some interviews were completed in tandem with on-site participant observation to see how memorial practices link to the ways that interviewees communicated reconciliatory narratives.

Finally, these results were synthesized with a discursive data analysis exploring the statistical relationship between reconciliatory term usage and media/state ideology. This included transcript analysis of 81 Radiyo Rwanda segments from August 2012 through May 2013, 382 print articles (across The New Times, The Rwanda Focus, and Umuvugizi), 194 programs on TVR from January 2014 through November 2014, and a cursory viewing of the films of the first wave of Rwandan cinema. These texts/sources were selected based upon the breadth of their reach/influence within Rwanda (for instance, Radiyo Rwanda is far and away the most popular station among urban [40.53%] and rural [58.31%] audiences and is far and away the most recognized in terms of spontaneous awareness among Rwandan audience members [91.55%]; Incisive Research, 2009), their range of ideological position (though given the heavy influence of the state among media industries in Rwanda this is quite difficult), as well as to get a good cross section of topics and media foci from across a close to a calendar year (largely to look for variation in term usage between April, Rwanda’s memorial month, and the remainder of the calendar). Additionally, material was considered due to its availability (the archiving of media texts is spotty at best) as well as to avoid material in translation (as this could potentially skew results).

This analysis involved bringing available transcripts (and hand transcribing where transcripts were unavailable), compiling them into spreadsheets and sorting them by term. The data identified a range of terms and phrases that had an inordinately high rate of occurrence across media platforms, particularly reconciliatory mantras (“we are all Rwandans,” “forgive, but don’t forget” and “genocide against the Tutsi”). This was triangulated with similar term usage brought up during interviews and that were, in some instances, clearly framed within memorial sites.

Dark tourism: Definition and ideology

Though some have suggested that thana- and dark tourism “constitutes a particular type of experience, rather than a category of motivation” (Light, 2017: 295), the catalysts for visiting such sites, and the range of experiences and relationships that they have with a given memorial site have a great impact upon not only the “push & pull” factors that govern their visit, but also the meaning-making process of travel. Using Graham M.S. Dann’s (1977) model of thinking about the motivations that guide tourists to leave home (be “pushed”) to entice them to visit sites (be “pulled”) is critical because it allows our analysis of the Dark tourist to reconcile a range of potential reasons that guide visiting such sites. There has been little (if any) real discussion of the relationship between stakeholders, its tourism industry, and the disavowed genocide sites that exist across Rwanda. Such a gap is problematic in Rwanda since it tends to prize the experience of outside visitors and effaces potential gaps between local communities and state endorsed narratives about the genocide. More to the point, the “ethically laden” (Friedrich et al., 2018: 262) nature of these sites means that we must recognize not only the potential difficulty they represent, but also their potential as spaces for reconciliation.

Definition

A quick perusal of articles discussing dark tourism gives you an idea of how popular culture views these practices. With titles ranging from “Is ‘Dark Tourism’ OK?” (Reid 2016) to “Can dark tourism ever be a good thing?” (Stokes, 2013) little room appears to exist for the range of potential motivations that guide such tourists. Though some claim that dark tourism “entails fascination with death as a primary reason of attraction” (Korstanje and George, 2015: 130), looking across the breadth of dark tourism scholarship, the most common motivation for visiting these sites is the “desire or opportunity for education/learning/understanding” (Light, 2017: 286). Additional motivations include “connecting with one’s personal or family heritage” and “desire to connect,” which hardly match up with popular culture’s tendency to characterize such tourists as perverse.

Dark tourism in popular culture has materialized as a kind of grotesque reenactment; a morbid curiosity born out of the desire of visitors to take surreal pleasure in the exoticization of the cultural practices, pain, and even death of others. Newspapers, magazines, and television programs (including Netflix’s recent program Dark Tourist, 2018) have characterized dark tourists as outsiders, often looking for a cheap thrill in experiencing the worst of humanity (genocide and war, in particular) from a safe distance.

This perspective is simplistic and ignores the wide range of uses and practices deployed by those that visit such sites. There exist a range of ways to approach the definition of dark tourism, ranging from very broad inclusive transactional models (Bird et al, 2018; Seaton, 2018) to those that call into question the very notion of static definition (Roberts, 2018; Stone, 2018). Part of this is because dark tourism destinations vary in their location, layout, and the depth of their visitors’ engagement. Examples range from war hostels that recreate the experience of living in a city under siege (replete with the sounds of gunfire, explosions, and rooms made deliberately uncomfortable [Higgins, 2018]), the opening up of genocide sites to visitors to recreate or memorialize death on a catastrophic scale, and even more regimented and controlled museum spaces that both educate and memorialize historic limit events.

Though quite different from one another, these sites are carefully curated in their content, spatial organization, and discursive approach. While the design of some sites facilitates a more passive experience (to walk through, or tour, a “dark” or “thana” space), others are for active, if not complicit, engagement. As Journalist Higgins (2018) points out, “war tourists with a criminal blood lust [. . .] used to go [to Sarajevo] to take potshots, for a fee, with sniper rifles and even antiaircraft guns at Muslim residents scurrying for cover in the city below.” Such practices tend to frame dark tourism as historical and contemporaneous, while also reinforcing misunderstandings of who dark tourists are.

According to Tony Seaton, the use of the term “dark” implies a continuum between “light” forms of tourism (viewed as culturally and socially acceptable), and those “dark” forms that are “transgressive, morally suspect, and pathological” (Seaton, 2009a: 521, 522). Not only does this suggest that one can objectively evaluate the ethicality of dark tourism practices across a wide range of stakeholders (visitors, managers, and communities), it also envisions that such stakeholders operate with similar motivations for similar ends—a problematic proposition. The development of tourism around places and spaces of death raises questions about whether the exploitation of such sites is proper or acceptable; a conversation that in the popular press has often reached a fever pitch, verging on “moral panic” (Seaton and Lennon, 2004: 63–82).

Within Seaton’s “heritage force field” there are a wide range of stakeholders, including Owner/Controllers (who “build” and manage the site), Subject Groups (“about whom the heritage narrative is told”), the Host Community (located near the site), Visitor Groups (Seaton, 2001: 124), and the Media (Seaton, 2009b: 106). Of particular interest to this discussion is the complex relationships that form in contexts where stakeholder groups overlap. The clear lines between many of these group’s blur in the Rwandan context since members of the local community were victims/bystanders/perpetrators (subject groups) of the genocide, have a vested interest in the messaging of the site (since most of these sites are centrally located in the local districts, making them part of the host community) and participate in events that bring them to the sites in events of remembrance/memorialization (visitor groups). Though they often have much less control over the curation of the sites than the managing NGOs and the Rwandan government (the Owner/Controller group), many in the community work as “guardians” of genocide sites, where they do have a direct, “everyday” impact. Kigali controls much of the decision making regarding these sites through the relationship between government and media, including carefully written “scripts” used by guardians to describe the history of the sites.

In fairness to the entities that manage and direct these memorial sites, the task of negotiating the wide range of narratives and perspectives that coexist, and at times contradict one another, within a post genocide context is particularly difficult. If, as Seaton suggests, the primary goal of site managers is to avoid the issues and conflicts at dark tourism sites “through consultation in initiating and maintaining sites [with other stakeholders]” (Seaton, 2009b: 98), the complex relationship between Rwanda’s various subject groups poses an almost impossible task. The complex history of ethnic conflict has created a set of competing records that often paint the range of stakeholders within unsettled and revolving categories of perpetrator, bystander, and victim. As a result, there is no context in which subject groups or stakeholders can see themselves as having equal footing with others. Since discussion of ethnic or victim/perpetrator identity fringes on being “divisionist,” the management of the narratives at these sites has fallen under the supervision of the government.

Ideology

The effects of this have been far-reaching, particularly as a younger generation of Rwandans have had to cobble together their history with limited resources. Following a long pause, the Rwandan Ministry of Education allowed for the teaching of Rwandan history in 1999, but this came with little in the way of guidance, and there were “no new textbooks or teaching materials” (Weinstein et al., 2007: 55). While this would seem to indicate a “hands off” approach by the government in formulating a national discourse on genocide history, the opposite is true. Though Rwandan history education in schools was nonexistent, Rwandan media—much of which has historically fallen under government control—consistently reinforced the ethnic narrative of “genocide against the Tutsi.” During the data collection period, the term “Tutsi” appeared in nearly 18.52% of Radiyo Rwanda broadcasts sampled (more than even “commemoration” or “United Nations”) and 13.89% of Rwanda Television broadcasts. The term “Hutu” doesn’t show up once in the same broadcast sample.

In a practical sense, the responsibility for much of the civic and historical education of young Rwandans lies on the shoulders of newspaper writers, television journalists, and documentarians, as well as radio pundits. While a good number of publications, filmmakers, and radio broadcasters in Rwanda are “independent,” the vast majority of those with any substantial market share remain closely aligned ideologically with the state. For instance, of the 11 publications with more than 1% of overall print market share, 9 are pro-government, state run, or government leaning religious publications that total 82.99% of total market share (Incisive Research, 2009). As such, that these outlets frame Rwandan identity as post post-ethnic, yet still relating victimhood to ethnic identity across this mediascape presents serious problems. The simple phrase “twibuke jenoside yakorewe Abatutsi (let us remember the genocide against the Tutsi),” which appears on banners at genocide memorials, on posters at commemorative events, and on signs carried by those remembering the genocide, has effaced many of the complexities of victim/perpetrator paradigm.

The relevance of this phrase, and the impacts of it on Rwandan social reality, lies in its ability to address the genocide in such a way that those coming in from the outside can accept as incontrovertible fact, even if this is hardly the case for those living in the country. According to Peter Hohenhaus, if we look at how the country has approached the issue of memory and genocide, “Rwanda has quickly shown a remarkable willingness to confront its violent past, that is, to engage in the process frequently referred to by the German term Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung or ‘coming to terms with the past’” (Hohenhaus, 2013: 144). Looking with a more critical eye, this “coming to terms” has been superficial in the sense that, while it may be convenient for visitors to Rwanda to accept that the genocide was “against the Tutsi,” Rwandans face the reality that the genocide marks every element of their daily life. Tutsi were not the only victims of the genocide. This is not to minimize the brutality and the extent to which Tutsi were the primary targets of genocidal violence (government estimates show more than 90% of the victims of the genocide were Tutsi [SURF Survivors Fund, n.d.]), but at a conservative minimum about 63,000 victims were not.

In addition to the phrase “genocide against the Tutsi,” the most the most pronounced examples of discursive framing are the repeated reconciliatory mantras that have become a staple of social discourse, and the simultaneous deployment and negation of ethnic identity by the Rwandan state and media (particularly at genocide sites). Across numerous interviews, the English phrases “forgive, but don’t forget” and “we are all Rwandans” appear regularly—even with interviewees that did not speak English. More than an expression of popular sentiment, students repeat “We are all Rwandans” as a return to precolonial unity (Twenty Years Later, 2014), people on the street immediately respond with it when asked about ethnic tension in Rwanda today (Coleman, 2019), it is even seen as “the founding doctrine of the new Rwandan state” (Gourevitch, 2011). The international coproduction, We are all Rwandans (2008), directed by Debs Paterson and cowritten with Ayuub Kasasa Mago, embodies the centrality of this phrase in telling the true story of students at the Nyange secondary school that refused to separate themselves along ethnic lines.

Such narratives reinforce not only the need to unify the government and society but also to distinguish between the internal “we” that are together to defend ourselves, from those attacking us from “out there.” As Buckley-Zistel (2009: 33) points out, the attempts by the Rwandan government to engage with ethnic identity and cultural history articulates a strategy based upon, “first, the establishment of a common ideal; second the creation of an outside enemy and third, the creation of an internal enemy”. In such a way, the ideal of unification has become a tool in castigating the international community and Rwandans in exile (the outside enemy), as well as isolating critics of the government and Hutu activists (the internal enemy).

For Rwanda, the complicity of the international community in the genocide remains a critical element of the nationalist narrative, particularly around April, the official month of remembrance. While the UN is mentioned sparsely throughout the year (in approximately 4.44% of sampled Radiyo Rwanda broadcasts between August and February, and largely in the context of international development), its rate of occurrence spikes to 22.22% of sampled broadcasts during April. As recently as 2014, commemoration events have included the depictions of UN soldiers as ineffectual, or even active participants in the genocide. In one such memorial ceremony, a reenactment of the colonial history of Rwanda, the government employed eight Russian soldiers playing the part of the colonialists. At one point in the event, colonialists “trade their safari hats for the blue berets of U.N. peacekeepers and drive off through the fallen and falling bodies” (NPR, 2014). In this case, the iconography reiterating the failures of the global community in the face of the genocide serves a double purpose in that it not only reinforces a national cultural memory of the relationship between Rwandans and this community, it also creates an important foil against which the government can place itself to form “a crucial part of contemporary Rwanda’s sense of self-reliance in its national identity—and thus is also an element of the place identity of the genocide memorial sites” (Hohenhaus, 2013: 145). In this context, reconciliatory mantras operate to differentiate outsiders (those that failed us all) from the Rwandan people (those that were failed).

Less than a decade after the genocide, Rwanda’s government constructed reeducation camps to reintegrate many members of the former Rwandan government back into society, based upon a principle of outlawing ethnic identity. According to one participant, Ernest Twahrwa, “They’re trying to change what we think [. . .] There is no ethnicity here. We are all Rwandan” (Lacey, 2004). Though such a phrase operates as a powerful expression of the desire for solidarity, it is important to recognize that not all Rwandans share the same perspective on reconciliation.

In fact, many survivors refuse to go to the memorials or national ceremonies (Jessee, 2017: 108, 109), which is somewhat problematic since there is an expectation that they take part. Others would prefer to have their relatives buried on private land rather than put on display (Eltringham, 2014: 208) because these mass memorials tend to anonymize or “erase” the victims, a form of “soft violence” that puts the observer in the same position of the victim as the perpetrator (Bolin, 2012: 201). If this is the case, why don’t more Rwandans speak out against the practice of mass memorialization?

Fear of retaliation could be one factor, as researchers have found that many Rwandans were “unwilling to discuss their experience unless it corresponded closely with the government narrative” (Jessee, 2017: 82). Though there is a constitutional guarantee of free speech, to speak or act in a “divisionist” way is strictly outlawed (though vaguely defined). The most public examples of the paradoxical nature of this arrangement are numerous journalists that have faced arrest and imprisonment for their reporting, including one reporter receiving a 17-year sentence (later reduced by the Supreme Court) for “civil disobedience, insulting the president, spreading false rumours and denying the genocide of the Tutsis” (Reporters Without Borders, 2011).

This just is one of numerous cases that outline the dangers that journalists face (Rwanda places as 155th out of 180 countries in the 2019 Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index [Reporters Without Borders, n.d.]), but none of these actions take place in a vacuum. Rwandans have repeatedly watched the detainment of journalists, activists, and their neighbors, in some cases for acts as minor as criticizing the government or the President. In such a way, the repetition of reconciliatory mantras both reinforces one’s support for the government narrative, while avoiding suspicion that you might be harboring divisionist ideology. Importantly, guides at memorial sites use these phrases as part of guided tours (particularly emphasizing the need to remember).

Conclusions

At its most basic level, this is a conflict over the formulation and the adoption of a new value system, propagated by Rwandan media, in which collectivism and collective identity play a part in prescribing a set of values endorsed by the state. Repeated phrases on the radio and across a wide range of public institutions (in newspapers, churches, and schools, to name a few) operate as anchor points for Rwanda’s acceptable public discourse.

If “we are all Rwandans,” then why has the government continued to implement the ghosts of the past as the foundation for its future (“forgive, but don’t forget”)? Though the Rwandan constitution outlines the right of free speech, it also limits it by outlawing “divisionism.” The construction of this new national identity, around the invocation of victimhood and the condemnation of “harboring genocidal ideology,” posits a new paradigm that limits the acceptability of the demonstration of ethnic identity.

Looking across the spectrum of Rwandan media, the erasure of Hutu and Twa identity is remarkable. The phrase “genocide against the Tutsi” has become not only a center piece of Rwandan media during the yearly period of remembrance in April, but it also adorns many of the genocide sites across Rwanda, as well as the banners carried by marchers through cities within, and outside of, Rwanda. The use of this phrase is somewhat newer, having only been actively deployed as recently as 2008 (Gourevitch, 2011), but it gets to the heart of the dual identity system that has been integrated into new Rwandan nationalism. Though there were a range of victims of the genocide, there is no room in the new nationalist mythology for such variegation since it raises complex issues including retaliation against Hutu by the RPF and alleged indiscriminate violence by the RPF.

Dark sites in Rwanda reinforce this paradoxical discursive formulation, but there is a great deal of localized thana—experience in Rwanda that remains outside of government control. One interviewee described how, in the days and months following the end of the genocide, they would pass bodies lying in the street that ran by their house—left there since there were hardly the resources to move them. In this way, the memory of genocide remains embedded in his everyday experience, with similar experiences impacting most Rwandans. For them, walking to work, taking their kids to school, getting groceries is an (often unintentional) act of remembrance—a tourism of the banal that carries its own meaning-making processes that for many lay in contradiction the mythology built by the national memorials. Though this form of memorialization is difficult to quantify, it is no less important for the large number of Rwandans that “forgive, but don’t forget” to carry on with their lives.