Day 1 in Rwanda: Things work differently in Kigali

I arrived in Kigali on the evening of May 29^th. It was a Thursday and very clearly not a holiday: I did not have to queue outside of the airport in Nairobi, and all the occupied counters were engaged in processing one flight at a time. It seemed our small two-by-two plane was the only flight due in Kigali between nine and ten o’clock; at any rate, its passengers were the only people in the arrivals hall, which made the process of obtaining an on-arrival visa go by very quickly. There was also no need to queue to exchange my one-hundred-dollar US bank note for Rwandan Francs.

A few difficulties, however, were bound to emerge. Firstly, I was unable to connect to the airport Wi-Fi. I would ordinarily blame this on my obsolete phone, but a few weeks ago, I was compelled to buy a new phone when my old phone’s battery swelled to such a monstrous size that it lifted off the back cover. Thus, when my new phone could not connect, I was forced to simply conclude that the airport’s Wi-Fi was garbage. The next difficulty lay in arranging a ride to my hotel. Before my journey, I had been reassured by several tourist websites that Bolt was available in Rwanda. This turned out not to be the case, so I had to accede to the inflated rates of the drivers waiting outside the main airport building.

It was in this first interaction with a Rwandan on the street that I noticed a cultural trait I had previously encountered in Uganda: Rwandans speak very quietly to show respect. Were my hearing any better, I would find this endearing, but it is not, and so I always find it somewhat inconvenient. Despite these hick-ups, I arrived at my hotel earlier than expected, and I managed to catch enough sleep to feel fresh the following day.

The next day was a teleworking day, but since it was a Friday, I got to clock out at half past two Kenya time – or half past one in Rwanda. I had specifically chosen a hotel close to the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which was the one sight everyone recommended I visit in the city. What I did not realise, however, was that distances in Kigali do not map neatly onto the time it takes to travel them, as the city is built on several steep hills. While this worked to my advantage walking downhill from my hotel, I quickly made up my mind that I would take a taxi back.

I noticed a few interesting things on this fifteen-minute walk. Most obviously, I noticed the hill right across from me, whose modern structures towered above slopes covered in low-rise houses. No less obvious – and certainly very appreciated – was the presence of pavements along the road. Confirming what I had heard of Kigali before, the roadsides and storefronts were clean and well-kept; I had already noticed the previous night how smooth and well-marked the roads were, and how well-lit the city was. Now, in broad daylight, it also appeared quite green.

Upon arriving at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, I was shown through a metal detector and ushered into the reception building. The receptionist explained to me that the entry was free but that tourists usually gave optional donations. I dropped two five-thousand banknotes into the transparent box and thought the lady looked satisfied. I was then shown into a room where a short documentary about the genocide had just begun to play; most of the people in the room appeared foreign, and perhaps even the few Africans present were also tourists from other countries.

This ethnic composition, however, completely reversed once the doors opened and we walked across a courtyard towards the museum building. My visit apparently coincided with a memorial pilgrimage by the survivors of the genocide. I saw whole crowds of people wearing dark shirts and short hoods (reminiscent of the hoods that master’s students wear for graduation), which were emblazoned with a two-word motto and the number 31, denoting the number of years since the massacre happened. When we entered the museum, we were so numerous that we had to form a queue through the main exhibition. Very unusually, everyone was completely silent as they slowly shuffled through the rooms, stopping for several minutes to read the boards and watch the recordings every time they made a few paces.

The outer ring of the main exhibition, which was on the bottom floor, covered the history of the genocide, including its precursors and some of its reverberations. The Rwandan Genocide was a cataclysmic event, but violence against the Tutsi minority had erupted several times in previous decades, accompanied by discriminatory quotas, unfair laws, and popular prejudice. Even after the genocide, there were a few more episodes of ethnic violence, though these happened on a much smaller scale and were, obviously, not sanctioned by the new Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front government as the previous outbursts were.

The inner ring of the museum’s bottom floor housed more personal items: photos of the victims, clothes, and even their skulls and bones. The top floor had two exhibitions. The first detailed several genocides across the world, beginning with another African genocide – that of the Herero. Namibia and Rwanda thus bracketed the biggest genocides of the twentieth century, from the Holocaust to the Khmer Rouge and Bosnia. The second exhibition was a stirring set of panels and pictures of child victims of the Rwandan Genocide.

Leaving the museum building, the main path led me to a row of massive slabs, under which the remains of over 250,000 people were interred following the genocide. I walked along these to the back of the museum to see the fountain and the archive building, after which I reversed course to the eternal flame and the podium. Just as I was about to start thinking how I would get to my next destination, however, I was approached by a taxi driver asking whether I wanted a lift. I said that I did, and he drove me down the hill and up another one to the Kigali Convention Centre.

This Kigali landmark, which relatively recently replaced gorillas on the 5000 Franc banknote, is a giant glass dome that lights up in the colours of Rwanda’s national flag in the evening. A bridge connects it to a massive, multi-coloured Radisson Blu Hotel, which partly obstructs the view from several sides. The two buildings stand above a massive roundabout which was under reconstruction during the time of my visit, but this was convenient for me, as I could ask the driver to simply drop me off at the dead end of the incomplete circle so that I could take some pictures from afar.

I approached the convention centre intending to take a picture through the gate, but when I asked the guard whether I could do so, I got a very firm response to the contrary. “Take the picture from there,” he said, pointing about ten metres away from the gate. I walked to where he had indicated but there was no point in taking the shot. “No, that would be a shit picture,” I shook my head and left.

As I walked around the heavily guarded centre, I noticed that there were practically no pedestrian crossings anywhere. Kigali has been built well, it must be said, but it has been built well for cars and not pedestrians. Or perhaps even more strangely, it has been built with some consciousness of pedestrians, as every road has a pavement on at least one side, but little thought has been given to pedestrians’ actual needs. Nowhere was this more evident than at Kimihurura Roundabout Park, where one of the pedestrian crossings led straight into a guardrail. It seemed to me as though some general orders had been given to build the city, but there was not enough expertise or common sense to properly fulfil it. The Centenary Park, for instance, had beautiful grounds, but nobody was there because beside one walkway parallel to the road, it had no walking trails.

Having wandered into another area with guards posted outside each of its important-looking buildings, I decided to call it a day and catch a cab to my hotel. Following my fiasco the night before, I had downloaded two different rideshare apps that work in Rwanda: Yego and Move Share by Volkswagen. Yego required me to sign-in through an SMS verification code that never arrived on my phone. Move Share, on the other hand, asked me to put in either a Rwandan or a South African phone number but never verified it. My choice, therefore, was obvious.

I walked a little distance away from the last guarded building I could see before calling my cab, as I was acutely aware of the attention I was attracting. That whole afternoon, I kept putting away my camera so as not to arouse any suspicions, except when I knew I was already being watched, because I thought it might look even more suspicious if I tried to hide my camera. I posted myself next to some motorcycle drivers waiting to catch some clients, and awkwardly refused their offers as I very obviously tapped away on my rideshare app.

The first cab I summoned was not moving after several minutes, so I called the driver to ask where she was. The lady, however, turned the tables on me and asked where I was. “I don’t know, I’m at an intersection; it says KG 4 on one of the signs, please just look at your map.” We want back and forth a few times until I was reduced to begging the lady to use the map and she was reduced to speaking Kinyarwanda. I cancelled the ride. Before I managed to call a second ride, however, a guard came over from the distant opposite corner to tell me that I could not order a cab there. “I thought I could because there are all these motorcycle drivers here,” I said somewhat testily. “You can get a motorcycle but not a car,” the man said, convincing me further that there were no rules beside wanton obstructiveness.

I could not help smiling forlornly at the guard and said that it seemed I couldn’t do anything in Rwanda. He smiled awkwardly and left, while I moved a few paces down the road and tried my luck once more. Again, I had to call the driver to make sure he was on his way, and another time to ask him where he was, as the app simply refused to update his location. “No, you are not here,” I caught myself saying more annoyed than I would have liked, “I said I’m at the intersection of KG 2 and KG 4 Avenue.”

The ride went smoothly enough, but at the end of it I found that unlike all sane and reasonable rideshare apps under the sun, Move Share by Volkswagen shows its price before factoring in tax. I thus found myself short of 750 Francs, and the driver did not have change for my 5000. As the hotel reception had no change and nor did the hotel restaurant, I found myself walking to the shops down the street. This was not entirely inconvenient, as I needed to buy some food for the upcoming few days. Arranging the trip, I managed to haggle the price of my gorilla experience down by almost two hundred dollars, but this came at the cost of having my overpriced touristy meals excluded from the deal. This was what I set out to procure, and I eventually found some biscuits that I figured would make for a solid breakfast.

After giving a thousand to the driver (I did not want to quibble over the rest), I set off to buy some fruit. I found a store at the corner of the road, but I could not figure out which of the ladies in front of it owned it. I approached one of them and asked in English, but despite pointing at the shop and the products inside it, I could not make myself be understood for a good while. They must have eventually caught my drift, as the owner of the shop next door ambled out and asked what I would like to buy. I tried asking whether the bananas I saw were “for cooking or for eating,” but this was another completely incomprehensible question. I figured that I could not make a mistake if I simply bought a bunch of small, sweet bananas. Later that evening, I supplemented my purchases by ordering a few vegetarian samosas from the restaurant at my hotel.