A recent trip to Rwanda provided wonderful opportunities to meet new people, reacquaint myself with the country, and keep the shutter on my camera very busy. I had been to Rwanda before the 1994 genocide. Upon my return trip I discovered much had changed. New roads, buildings, and street lights had transformed much of the Rwanda. Most amazing to me was the country’s conversion from a Francophone (French speaking) country to one where English was now predominant over French as an official language. In but one generation Rwandans had adopted an entirely new official language while at the same time retaining fluency with their own Kinyarwandan language.
One day I went to a workshop in rural Rwanda where men were using pangas (machetes), knives, and chisels to fashion incredible works of art out of raw trunks and branches of trees. Their artwork was subsequently sold at the market. Although I have observed such wood handicrafts for years I had never been to an actual workshop. My teacher and I spent almost half a day transforming a branch into a small elephant, using hand tools only. My task was to fashion this wooden object, but the final product would have been pathetic without his skilled intervention at key stages in the process. I would have also likely cut myself with the sharp tools.
This fear of being hurt by the knives got me to thinking that a panga, which we were using to create a work of beauty, had been employed in the past to kill fellow humans. In 1994, around eight hundred thousand Rwandans died in a horrible fashion—many hacked to death by pangas. The scars and memories of that event will remain with the country for a long, long time. Indeed, I also visited the Murambi Genocide Memorial Center in the south of the country. At the site of a massacre, school buildings contained hundreds of people. The bodies had been exhumed from mass graves and some were placed in these schoolrooms. Their bodies were then preserved by lime, a chilling and tangible testament to their slaughter some quarter of a century ago.
The men who worked in the workshop creating works of art were for the most part too young to remember that dreadful time. They used their pangas to create, not to destroy. They worked together in peace. As someone who travels regularly to countries that are in economic and political turmoil this experience was a powerful testament to Rwandans' ability to overcome a destructive past and build a better world. My wooden elephant was pretty cool too!
A Crafts Workshop in Rwanda