Remembering the horror of Rwanda’s genocide 

It had been more than 30 years, yet I recognised the church and its surroundings instantly. Superimposed on the tidy green sward of today, I recalled the rags, shoes and corpses I saw here in May 1994. There are gaps in my memories of Rwanda. But the parts I do recall are explosively vivid, as if branded on my retina, like those people outside the church. They’d lost heads and limbs and every-body was dead, but the scene was alive. I could see and hear their last moments. A woman lay in my path, on her back with her gingham skirt hitched up around her thighs. Not much flesh left on her skeleton, her hair sloughing off, her face and frame frozen at the end of her rape, when her attacker shot her in the heart.

The memory of it remains as if encased in amber, that brief glance down at the woman on the grass, before I went on. As we entered the church on that first day, the black floor buckled and disintegrated as millions of flies took to the air above a tangle of rags and limbs and bags of guts. I gave up counting the bodies. Today, the church interior is full of ivoried skulls tidily arranged on shelves. Back outside, where we had sat down on the grass to watch clouds of butterflies, white with orange-tipped wings, flexing on the edges of mud puddles around the corpses – today there is a wall engraved with all the names of the dead who could be identified. I felt great admiration for the Rwandans who had built this memorial, that for once in Africa everybody who died here had been commemorated as people rather than lost in that pile of nameless death.