Carla Rose Shapiro, Ph.D, sits at the head of a table in a small room at the Munk Centre. Behind her is projected a photo of about two dozen smiling young women, dressed in their school finery and standing beside their teacher. “Only three of them survived,” says Shapiro.
The picture is part of an exhibition she and photographer Leib Kopman created from the stories of survivors of the Rwandan Genocide. The exhibition, entitled “Portraits from the 100 Days,” documents the three-and-a-half month period beginning April 6, 1994, during which at least 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus were brutally murdered by Hutu militias and civilians as the rest of the world stood by. Others were beaten and repeatedly raped.
Kopman and Shapiro interviewed and photographed ten survivors now living in Southern Ontario. “We wanted to tell the history, the facts, but in the exhibit we also learn what people actually felt as they realized the genocide was unfolding,” she said, “the ominous playing of classical music on the radio…the frantic phone calls to loved ones.”
The stories of the attacks are truly chilling. “A soldier took my money and then hit me on the head with a machete,” reads the testimony of survivor Patrick Sharangabo, “The guy who worked packing the bodies into the truck sensed I was alive and made sure to throw me on top so I could still breathe.” Sharangabo survived by pulling himself out of a mass grave to safety.
The pictures in the exhibition, from before and after the genocide, depict normal people with normal lives, not the “backwards savages” often invoked by Western media coverage of what has been largely oversimplified as an age-old African “tribal war.” In fact, “Hutu” and “Tutsi” only came to be seen as separate political groups when Belgian colonialists played one against the other to more easily rule the country in the 19th century.
Thus the pictures of Rwandan girls graduating from high school and old couples sitting on front porches help combat an attitude that Sean Hawkins, head of the African Studies Department at New College, says is part of a long history of the West distancing itself from the plight of Africans, with fatal results.
It was this “wider pattern of Western indifference to Africa” that Hawkins says set the stage for non-intervention in Rwanda.
Examining that pattern of indifference is more urgent today than ever before, given the lack of effective reaction to the African AIDS pandemic and the genocide which is unfolding in southern Sudan.
“We dismiss Africa as a hopeless continent,” said Hawkins. “Yes, terrible things are happening in Africa, but we have to contextualise it. If we had had the same attitude we would have given up on Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century” when wars there killed 100 million people.
“AIDS is not something that happened last month,” Hawkins said, “we all know about it, every Western government.” We’ve spent billions “looking for weapons of mass destruction while there’s a disease of mass destruction [spreading across Africa].”
“Portraits from the 100 Days,” which was funded by the Law Foundation of Ontario, will be shown at Osgoode Hall at York University, October 18th – November 5th and will be shown at the University of Western Ontario Law School in the spring.
