Here is what I read to a crowd of people at Homegrown Cafe in Hamilton, ON, last night for the Time and Place: A Cultural Quarterly event. And what a great night is was. "This is a photograph I took in Rwanda last year as part of a course I was taking at Western. Part of the course included an intense, and condensed ten-day trip in which we visited the six national genocide memorial sites and about a dozen local, community sites. Before I get into my experience of the time and place in this photo, i want to take you back in time to the events that led to the creation of this space. In early April 1994, many of us were focused on or distracted by Kurt Cobain's sudden death, the first democratic elections in South Africa since the fall of apartheid, the spectacular, sensationalistic murder trial of OJ Simpson, while there was also the news of a small African country in Joseph Conrad's deep, dark heart of Africa (as the press would continually portray it), where government-backed militias unleashed a most horrific, brutal, carefully calculated and unprecedentedly swift genocide against the minority Tutsi population. From April 6 to July 4, in the space of 100 days, over 800,000 people were killed at the hands of the militia, government forces, the Rwandan police and army, and at the hands of neighbors, friends, and in some cases even family members. Some of you may remember this, or have learned more about it since then. Some of you may recall that a Canadian general, who has since become somewhat of a household figure, Romeo Dallaire, was the head of the UN Peacekeeping mission in Rwanda at the time, there to oversee peace negotiations between the extremist government and the rebels that had been in conflict for the previous four years. Some of you may also recall the controversy over the fact that UN soldiers were not allowed to intervene as it was against their mandate. This photograph is of a forest adjacent to one of the six national memorial sites. It is the site of the largest resistance against the genocidaires. The memorial site on the Bisesero hill overlooks the hilltop where the resistance fighters held off their perpetrators for nearly the full length of the genocide, only to be overcome in its last few days. The memorial site also overlooks a nearby village inhabited by a few of the survivors of that resistance group.
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