After the Holocaust by Charlotte Schallié

Author:Charlotte Schallié
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Regina Press
Published: 2020-10-02T21:44:10+00:00

Chapter 11

Peace Education After Genocide:

Creating a Travelling Exhibition in Rwanda

–Maggie Ziegler

An exhibition project on peacemaking after genocide brought challenges and new directions to the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Kigali, Rwanda. In addition to preserving memory and offering basic education about the 1994 genocide, the memorial began a deeper engagement with the question of whether reconciliation was part of its mandate. This chapter details the conception, methodology, and creation of this exhibition, identifying key questions and examining challenges, as well as exploring the impact of the project on the memorial centre’s staff. The approach used has relevance to Holocaust and post-conflict educators and to current curatorial approaches to memory.

My decision to travel to Rwanda in 2010 to act as adviser to educational programs at the main memorial site, the Kigali Genocide Memorial, wove together personal and professional interests. My father, born in 1917 to a Jewish family in Berlin, fled the Nazis in 1938, finding refuge in Kenya, where he lived for ten years before emigrating to Britain and later to Canada. The thick silence surrounding both his story and the Holocaust blanketed my childhood, engendering a curiosity and urgency not only about those events but more generally about the experience of the marginalized, the invisible, and the tortured. This painful childhood doorway opened to questions of how people can be rendered “Other,” then exploited, and ultimately murdered: questions that took me both inside and beyond the Holocaust. The Holocaust touched me personally, if indirectly, and it taught me to pay attention to how violence erupts and to how cycles of violence could be interrupted both psychically and collectively.

In this time of transition from living memory, it is important to honour the suffering and unique aspects of the Holocaust while widening our lens to learn from other atrocities. Historical study of the Holocaust supports the development of critical thinking and a frame for understanding the “violence and the peace of the twentieth century” (Swanson 2015). This important frame widens when we consider, for example, the 1905–9 genocide in Namibia perpetrated by the Germans against the Indigenous Herero and Nama peoples, when extermination orders were written and holding areas called “concentration camps” were established (Olusoga 2015). It expands again when we shift our gaze to colonial Kenya in the 1950s, where the British (my mother’s people) murdered between 100,000 and 300,000 Kenyans (Elkins 2005, 366) and established a series of detention camps that escalated in brutality. The gate at the most oppressive camp “was decorated with the command ‘Labour and Freedom’ ” (189), echoing the phrase “Work Makes You Free” that adorns the gate at Auschwitz. In Rwanda, genocide was linked to the Belgian colonial history in which existing social structures were codified in service of colonial interests. These events are a reminder that those bent on discrimination and maintaining power at all costs borrow freely from each other’s methodology. As Stanger-Ross suggests in chapter 5 of this volume, such examples of twentieth-century racial ideology need not involve a global hierarchy of

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