Illustration by Mice Hell
Conor Murphy
Deputy Opinion Editor
Is Africa going to be the next big tourist thing?…
Telling people you spent two weeks in Rwanda brings assumptions and questions, the main one being why would you do charity work for two weeks only? However, given the truth that I went to meet my sister and get drunk for two weeks, perhaps two weeks of nominal charity work would be a better story.
Arriving in the capital Kigali, it is a surprisingly simple experience. You get brought through the airport in about half an hour (helps that it’s the length of two buses end to end) and the only question passport control asked was what sights I wanted to see. I had been to Tanzania before so I was expecting a more functional place than most but my brother was bemused, having not really known what to expect.
As we went to the religious-led hostel we were staying in (all the best and affordable places tend to be religiously run) we went through a crazily clean city and had a drink in a local bar before heading to bed. It was in this half built local bar that I realised how important politeness and tidiness was to this country, it’s basically in the bottom ten countries in the world in wealth and their pub toilets are still far cleaner than ours.
The main chunk of the terrifying image of Rwanda comes from their genocide. This was the massive machete driven genocide of almost a tenth of their population, mainly of the Tutsi tribe, made famous by the film Hotel Rwanda, and the fact that up to a million died. We were in Kigali a day and were still complementing the functionality of the city when we went to the main “tourist attraction” of the city, the genocide memorial. This is the horrific and fascinating national account of the horrors that took place over only a few months in 1994. The sites in it are horrific. Especially the children’s room, a room where they show the life size pictures of smiling kids, with an example going “Name: Peter, Age: 4 [when he died], Favourite pastime: spending time with his mother, Death: stabbed repeatedly through the eyes.”
After coming out of that memorial you see the mass graves, only about forty meters long where hundreds of thousands of victims are buried and accounted for. We came out and spent the next two weeks wondering about the people we met, ‘what were you doing fifteen years ago?’ It’s a cruel, misleading and unavoidable question and it is an inevitable part of their fabric, however you would never mention it to them, it’s all very ‘don’t mention the war’.
This is partly why they needed Paul Kagame, the elected dictator. He has been a steady hand (to our western eyes) and Rwanda now has the second least corruption in Africa. He also took measures like banning the mention of Hutu or Tutsi races, now they are all Rwandans. You can’t have racism without races.
My brother and I then took a (perfectly on time) bus to the locality where my sister stayed in a small town called Gisenyi where her work involves giving teachers educational skills. It was only a few hours because Rwanda is so tiny, slightly smaller than Munster. You can stroll up to the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo, (the world’s poorest country by a long shot), which is just ten minutes from her house, but it seems quite safe locally. There have been a few terrorist grenade attacks recently but nothing an Irish person should be surprised at.
We were in a very normal part of town, there really isn’t a posh part. The neighbors lived in houses, most without doors, and openly stared like I had three heads even though my sister has been their neighbour for a year. The people there were very enthusiastic when we spoke with them and their English level is decent. They’re an ex-Belgium colony and have spoken French as their second language for decades however a few years ago their Dictator-in-Chief decided that they all should speak English in schools now and so every school’s old French-speaking teachers are now amazingly, English speakers. Just like that. Unions, evidently, aren’t a big thing yet.
Speaking of the Dictator-in-chief, he’s actually “democratically elected” but TIA (this is Africa) Most people seem to think rather highly of him, as maniacal dictators go. Considering he borders Uganda and the DRC the local competition isn’t very high. He prioritises education and trade to get his country out of the mess it’s been in and is actually investing in it. His country now has the 13th highest economic growth on the planet, soon they’ll have as much free education as us and all the tourist attractions we visited were built in the last few years.
The highlights of the actual visit were two trips to see wildlife, one a Safari and the other a trek to see some particularly rare monkeys. You can also go on a trek to see the Gorillas in the wild and walk right up to them and it sounds amazing and terrifying. A mixed group of travellers we talked to who had done the hilariously expensive trek to see them a day before (750 dollars each for the three HOUR trek) had said even at the price it felt like the best value ever. When they arrived the silverback, who was the size of a mini cooper hunched over, sized them up, walked up to the biggest guy in the group and knocked him over onto his ass to show who was boss! The landscape of Rwanda probably helps make those wildlife trips special. It’s known as the land of a thousand hills and the only flat part we saw was a spectacularly huge lake, which has an amazing five-day cycle path around its edges. My biggest regret is not doing that cycle.
The general safety of Rwanda is something I don’t really question. My two younger brothers just went over with my parents and I’d much rather they do that cycle on their own for five days than wander around parts of Dublin at night. As you might notice if you’ve visited anywhere with extreme poverty, there’s only severe culture of crime in places with something to steal. However saying that the wealth difference is never off your mind in a country where the people earn less than a dollar a day. I asked my sister would she ever consider going out with a local and she said that it’s sadly hard to trust the motivations of someone when you’re the equivalent of Bill Gates compared to a lot of people you meet.
Rwanda does seem to have the tools to develop fast. So does huge chunks of Africa and we never hear about the fast pace of growth, the plummeting child mortality rates and the huge spread of mobile phones and Internet. With this pace of development we should probably start looking at them as travel spots as much as charity cases, a much healthier view by all accounts. Rwanda’s really striving to get past one of the worlds’ most horrific crimes since World War II. Though possibly a more serious metric of its tourist capabilities would be a plummeting of plane ticket prices.
This is not to say that Rwanda is just another Ibiza, the country is only just building its first cinema, there’s not much to do for large swathes of time and Paul Kagame just went and got warned by the UN for possible war crimes in neighboring countries.
Ah well, TIA.
