Let Rwanda's pain be our lesson

A father's reflections on memory, love and the architecture of hope as he visits the memorial to the 1994 genocide with his family

- Wellington Muzengeza

here are places in this world that do not merely exist; they echo.

They do not simply hold history; they haunt it. The Kigali Genocide Memorial is one such place.

In the heart of Rwanda's capital, it stands as a graveyard and a classroom, a sanctuary and a warning.

It is a space where silence speaks louder than any sermon and where the past refuses to be buried without first being understood.

Yesterday, I stood within its solemn grounds with my wife Janet and our two children, Izzy and Penny. As a family that homeschools, we believe in learning through immersion, through presence, through truth, through the kind of education that cannot be outsourced to textbooks alone.

This visit was not a detour from our curriculum; it was the curriculum. And yet, even with our commitment to experiential learning, nothing in our pedagogical philosophy prepared us for the emotional architecture of that space.

In 1994, I was 13 years old. I remember watching the genocide unfold on BBC broadcasts — grainy footage, urgent headlines and a sense of distant horror.

I recall the confusion, the disbelief, the inability to understand how such violence could erupt so swiftly and so mercilessly.

But standing before the mass graves yesterday, some sealed, others still open, I realised how inadequate memory can be when it is not anchored in place. The graves do not ask for pity. They demand reckoning. They demand that we confront not only what happened, but how it happened, and why.

The memorial is not just a site of remembrance; it is a mirror. It reflects the consequences of division, of propaganda, of the slow erosion of empathy. It forces us to ask tough questions. What does it mean to be human in the face of such inhumanity? What does it mean to remember responsibly?