This past weekend I went on a trip with some friends throughout southwestern Rwanda and explored a few more parts of the country. We started out in Butare, a town two hours from Kigali where the National University of Rwanda is located. Besides being a cozy college town, Butare boasts one of the country’s main historical ethnographic museums and an enormous, lush arboretum run by university agricultural researchers.
The inside of the hut was surprisingly spacious and the banana leaves gave it a really nice smell. I wouldn’t mind living in one.
Next, we set off to take a walk through the arboretum and ran into some entertaining locals…
They were quite comfortable with humans and didn’t seem to mind the passing students or even the clicking and flashes of cameras. I think they are Vervet monkeys.
The arboretum at the National University of Rwanda, technically called the Ruhande Arboretum, covers 200 hectares of land and was first planted in 1933. It is home to about 200 deciduous trees and conifers, both indigenous and imported species. It’s often full of students relaxing or studying, especially during exam period.
This next one is for you, Gloria the Fern Thief/Liberator:
Later that night, we discovered a funky bar/club tucked away behind a restaurant in Butare. It’s called Space Place and the ambiance and DJ were so good we danced for three hours straight.
Unfortunately, a trip around Rwanda is rarely complete without a visit to one of the numerous genocide memorial sites spotting the countryside. On Sunday morning, some of us headed out to Nyamagabe/Gikongoro, a beautiful hill town that is also the site of the Murambi genocide memorial.
I’ve visited several genocide memorials and this was by far the most graphic, in addition to being heart-wrenchingly tragic. The building pictured below was constructed in the early 90s to be a technical school, but before it could open to receive students the genocide broke out in Gikongoro. Over the course of the killing spree, more than 50,000 Tutsis were slaughtered and thrown into mass graves around the technical school. What’s even more disgusting is that French soldiers, who were deployed in Operation Turquoise to essentially protect and assist the genocidal government, arrived at the site towards the end of the genocide and played a game of volleyball on top of fresh mass graves. Because of French support to the Interahamwe murderers in this area, the genocide was actually prolonged in the southwestern part of the country only.
Behind the main building there are rows of school rooms that are now filled with whole preserved skeletons of actual genocide victims in various positions of anguished death. Some of them still had tufts of hair or disintegrated clothing on them and many of them were the tiny skeletons of murdered children. The majority of those murdered at Gikongoro were re-buried with proper burial rites, but a few hundred are now on display in one of the most graphic and disturbing sites aimed at ensuring people never forget.
After decompressing and digesting what we had witnessed, we headed to Nyanza, a town on the road back to Kigali that hosts another official museum of Rwandan history and culture. There, we visited the site of the former king’s residence: a much larger banana leaf house surrounded by several other houses, in addition to a building constructed by the Belgians to win over one of the last kings and secure his support and conversion to Christianity. Unfortunately no pictures were allowed, but here’s a link to see the banana leaf house.
It was quite an adventurous weekend and it’s nice to be back home in Kigali. Now I can say that I’ve visited most of southern/western Rwanda – Butare, Gikongoro/Nyamagabe, Nyanza, Gisenyi, and Kibuye. Next on my list are Nyungwe forest (where the most remote source of the Nile has been identified), Akagera National Park, and Virunga National Park. For such a small country, there is a surprising number of sites and attractions to visit!
Thanks for the wonderful pictures, wish we had made it down to Butare when we were there.
Akagera was definitely worth a visit, we enjoyed seeing the various animals there. I would have loved to see some of the smaller monkeys though, the ones in your pictures are adorable.
I certainly hope to get back there to see more of the country!
Funny, I was just going to say what James just said–that I would have loved to have spent time in Butare. Makes a return trip that much more appealing, though. Thanks for letting us see it from afar.
Do many people still live in the countryside, and in such
banana huts? What if it involves a family with, say, 6 children?
Hey Helaina,
Those monkeys are definitely vervet monkeys… they’re all over Mpala.
Also, I slept in your bed two nights ago at Wildebeest Camp. You would be happy to hear that the huge hole is now a huge slit down the net that someone tried, but failed, to duck tape shut. Hope all is well!
-Theresa
I am in Rwanda and I do thank Helaina so much for those photos.
Right now I am doing my university studies at the National University of Rwanda! I am even conducting my project in Arboretum and I always see these monkeys.
My name is Michael. (micmas2@gmail.com)
Hope you come back to Rwanda soon:)
Thanks for reading, Michael! It’s so much fun to walk around the Arboretum at NUR and watch the monkeys. Now I’m back in Rwanda and very happy to be here again. I hope your project is going well!