An Art Festival in Rwanda Converses with the Past and Celebrates Our Shared Present

When you ask Rwandans where they were during the genocide of 1994, they will tell you that they were not there, Odile Gakire Katese tells the audience. During the hundred-day-long mass murder in which at least eight hundred thousand Tutsis and defiant Hutus were slaughtered, they were away at school or visiting relatives. The entire country was inexplicably empty. “I don’t know how heavy your story is,” Katese says, “maybe you have to change it to survive.”

Katese, better known to her audience as Kiki, performed her one-woman show The Book of Life as a part of Rwanda’s annual Ubumuntu Art Festival. This year, the three-day festival brought together artists from twelve different countries and five continents. These performances included dancers from Spain and The Democratic Republic of The Congo (DRC), poets from Kenya and South Africa, singers from Nigeria, actors from Burundi and Uganda, and of course, a strong representation from Rwandan artists as both collaborators and standalone presenters. While some performances uniquely centered dance or music, most performances intertwined multilingual dialogue, dance, music, poetry, and media in various combinations.

These young performers carry the weight of this history and take their duty to tell and retell the stories seriously.

“Ubumuntu” is a Kinyarwanda word meaning “humanity.” Embracing our shared humanity, especially in the face of fear, is the prevalent theme of the festival. This is further illuminated by the festival’s venue, the Kigali Genocide Memorial, the burial site for 250,000 genocide victims (and counting), which contains an overview of the history leading up to and during the genocide. Each evening, the master of ceremonies, Fola Folayan, began by leading the audience in a moment of silence to honor the lives lost.

What followed these quiet moments was far from somber but was always just as reflective. The performances were often exuberant and celebratory. They heavily engaged the audience (my husband and I found ourselves frequent targets for audience participation). And they explored the full breadth of what it means to be a human post-tragedy—the highs and the lows.

Closing the first night of the festival was a performance called Generation 25, in which a group of young Rwandans embrace the conflict of their identities as both the keepers of this dark history and citizens who do not wish to be defined by the inhumanity which they had nothing to do with. “My identity’s already stained,” a young performer exclaims over the music. Later, from an elevated position, she punctuates every word as she says “I am me and that does not define me,” drawing cheers from the audience. Even so, these young performers carry the weight of this history and take their duty to tell and retell the stories seriously. In French, one actor tells us about his father, one of the genocidaires. An actress repeats, “What kind of man would kill an innocent baby?” over and over until her sorrow takes on a melody and she sings the words. She concludes, “A man not born with hate, but who learned to hate.”

“Genocide is likely to happen again.” Stated at the top of the performance and again at the end, this declaration feels simultaneously hopeless and like the most compelling call to action a person can make from the stage. A call to remember, to stay vigilant, to recognize the signs.

Generation 25 was devised by Mashirika Performing Arts and Media Company (MPAMC). Both MPAMC and the festival itself are the brain children of Hope Azeda, the festival curator and leading figure in Rwandan theatre. “There was a time I was really tired of talking about these stories,” Azeda shares in an interview on YouTube. “I was like let’s talk about love, some love, some comedy. About lives, flowers, you know, butterflies. But everything you try to bring becomes a part of that. Because, you as a person, you’re part of this history.”

Azeda’s words in this interview shine a new light onto a particularly striking piece called this is one of them, a collaboration between France and Rwanda, performed on the last night of the festival. On stage, Dorothée Munyaneza slowly brings out a giant insect wing into a space littered with the disembodied pieces of the insect. She chants into a microphone in Kinyarwanda. Her voice, vibrating and fading in and out, expertly mimicks a fly getting caught in your ear. Dressed in a black cloak with a glimmer of blue, she dances with sporadic and impulsive movements across the stage.

Munyaneza dared to create a piece of art about a fly. But performed on a stage next to the resting place of people who were called “cockroaches” by those seeking to dehumanize them, the piece inevitably converses with this history. Because everything you try to bring becomes a part of that, as Azeda reminds us. An artist can make art about flowers or butterflies, but that art will inevitably illude to their lived experience or positionality.

She shows her audiences how, in the absence of all these lost lives, we invent stories about what could have been.

Kiki’s The Book of Life had three performances during the festival, co-produced by Toronto-based Volcano Productions and Kiki’s own Huye-based Woman Cultural Centre. In an intimate venue, normally used as an art gallery, the audience sat on risers covered with cushions. Kiki told a fable about a group of animals trying to steal a piece of the sun, intertwined with letters written by victims and perpetrators of the genocide and her own personal narrative.

A chorus of women drummers called Ingoma Nysha sing, dance, and assist Kiki’s storytelling. In speaking with director Ross Manson after the performance, I discovered that women drumming, and especially women performing a warrior dance as these women did, is very subversive and was found quite offensive by some Rwandan men. This is certainly no accident. Kiki stated in the talkback following the show that in many aspects of her life she feels powerless, especially as a woman, but as an artist she feels powerful. The drumming of Ingoma Nysha was an epic display of women’s power. (This is true in spite of the fact that, given Kigali’s regulations about noise pollution, the women in this performance were only allowed to drum at about 20 percent of their normal intensity. As a non-African audience member, honestly, I might not have known if they had not told us.)

The show honors not just the lives lost in the genocide, but all the human potential lost. Kiki asks the audience to help her invent a grandfather for herself because she did not know hers. She wonders if the man that would have loved her was murdered as she looks at pictures of men at the memorial left behind by their families. She shows her audiences how, in the absence of all these lost lives, we invent stories about what could have been. Sometimes those invented stories are the most real thing we have left of people.

In the talkback, Kiki spoke of the difficulty of getting the people she worked with to write the letters she had collected. She stressed the importance of writing these personal narratives, not just telling them. The history of the genocide, and of Africa by and large, is told by the West—by scholars and academics outside the continent. In a literary culture, written narratives dominate our understanding of historic events because writing and publication comes with an air of authority. But in an oral tradition, which Kiki notes is the tradition of Rwanda, you own your narrative, and it continues to be malleable in whatever way you need it to be. Once it is written, published, and shared, it is unchangeable, and others can use it for their own purposes. This is, in fact, a concern the letter writers had. They wanted to know what she was going to do with their stories.

Aided by shadow puppets, Kiki told the story of a young woman whose father was accused of being a genocidaire. He denied all the allegations. The young woman disguised herself, attended his trial, and listened to everything her father was accused of. Kiki says, “She knew she had to steal her father’s story if she was ever going to hear it.”

Who controls your story? Who owns your story? Who has a right to your story? Although she makes letter writing a central component in her performance, Kiki is hesitant to publish the script or the letters for fear that the letter writers would no longer control their words. It is not lost on me that, by writing this essay, I am doing the very thing that Kiki and her letter writers are so skeptical of. I am a scholar claiming the authority that comes with writing about an event, thus defining it in my own (Western and anglophonic) terms. This is my paradox; I was moved by the play (and the entire festival). I want to document it and spread the knowledge of it, as writers are wont to do. But am I narrowing what it was or even stealing it in some way? Fortunately, you, reader, may be able to see the primary source for yourself. The Book of Life will tour the United States this fall. I encourage you to go see Ingoma Nysha drum at full volume. As for The Ubumuntu Arts Festival, next year’s theme is “Integrity: Resilience in the Face of Adversity” and it will take place 19-21 July 2024.

As a dramaturg, my role in the theatre is highly literary. I track changes to scripts, cite my sources for all the materials I provide to my collaborators, and write essays like this—searching for the perfect words to express my analysis. But fundamentally, all theatre is an oral tradition. Kiki may change her show so much that the performance one person sees in Austin, Texas bears little resemblance to the play I have described here. One of the most powerful forms of advertising in the theatre, word of mouth, relies on the memory of an audience member and their license to convey their experience in changeable ways to different people. Sometimes there is a time to write and sometimes there is a time to speak, leaving our words changeable in whatever way we need them to be.