murambi

IN 1994, in the village of Murambi, in Rwanda, over 40,000 Tutsis were killed in four days. It was one of the greatest single massacres of the genocide. But that's not why I visited Murambi. I visited because of what happened afterwards, when the bodies were thrown in mass graves and covered with lime to mask the smell. Ironically, the lime preserved the bodies. It mummified them. And so when the survivors came back to identify their dead, they decided to leave some of the bodies unburied. On display, in the schoolrooms where they died.



15 years later, the memorial at Murambi makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Some say it's too horrific and divisive, and it's time to bury the bodies. Others say, no, expose more of them and never forget. Hear the story on the Nextbook podcast.