Machetes

Despite being here for over 6 months, I have not yet got used to seeing machetes everywhere. Children and even prisoners carry them about in public in a way that would get you turned into a prisoner if you did it in the UK. The machete is also a powerful symbol of the genocide : many people were killed with them and the provision of new machetes to the militias is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for pre-planning of the events of 1994 (shown in both “Hotel Rwanda” and “Sometimes in April”).
We had a couple of men working on the garden recently and they were using a machete to prune trees. The dull thud of the metal on the wood was quite disturbing - even a sharp machete would not bring a quick death. The killings and mutilations of 1994 were described as “work” and with some reason, although it’s a horrible euphemism.

People here witnessed machete attacks, encouraged them, fled from them, survived them and carried them out. It’s hard to understand why they don’t appear to create the same uneasiness in Rwandans as they do in me.