Justice4Survivors

Making survivors’ voices count

Rwanda’s Genocide Memorials: Places of Memory

Every hill in Rwanda has a story from 1994. These are the places where survivors buried their families, and where anyone can still see what happened.

The four World Heritage sites More places of memory Visiting What researchers found What survivors say Hear survivors

Why these places matter

In 2019, Rwanda counted 207 genocide memorial sites and 159 genocide cemeteries across its thirty districts. Most began the same way: survivors, helped by neighbors and local officials, gathered the bodies of their families and gave them a burial.

In September 2023, UNESCO added four of them to its World Heritage List, the same list that holds Auschwitz-Birkenau. In its file to UNESCO, Rwanda compared them with Auschwitz and with the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. Their names deserve to be known the same way: Nyamata, Murambi, Gisozi, Bisesero, and the hundreds of others.

The four World Heritage sites

Nyamata

Bugesera District, Eastern Province · Remembered every April 14

Tutsi ran to the Catholic church at Nyamata, built in 1980, believing a church would protect them. It became a killing ground. Estimates of how many people died inside range from 10,000 to 45,000.

The bullet and grenade holes in the iron roof have been left as they were. Victims’ clothes and belongings remain inside, and graves surround the building. Nyamata stands for every church where people sought refuge and were killed.

Survivor and scholar Omar Ndizeye tells the story of this church in his memoir Life and Death in Nyamata (2020).

Murambi

Nyamagabe District, Southern Province · Remembered every April 21

A technical school still under construction in 1994. Tutsi from the region were told to gather there for their safety. About 50,000 people were killed on this hill.

Some victims’ bodies are preserved in lime and kept in the classrooms, and one mass grave has been left open. Murambi stands for every school, stadium and public office where Tutsi were sent and then killed, like the commune office in Butare where my mother and sisters died.

In 2022, a Paris court convicted Laurent Bucyibaruta, the former prefect of Gikongoro, of complicity in genocide, including for the massacre at the Murambi school.

Gisozi, Kigali Genocide Memorial

Gasabo District, Kigali · Mourning period April 7 to July 15

Built in 1999 as the burial place for the victims of Kigali. More than 250,000 people lie here. It is also a museum and the home of the Genocide Archive of Rwanda, run with Aegis Trust, and the best first stop for most visitors.

Rwanda opens and closes its national period of mourning here every year, and the flame of hope burns from April 7 to July 15. Gisozi stands for the genocide as a crime organized by the state.

Bisesero

Karongi District, Western Province · Remembered every June 27

On the hills of Bisesero, Tutsi from the Kibuye region fought back with spears and stones for more than two months before nearly all of them were killed.

The memorial, built in 1998, has three buildings of three rooms each, one room for each of the nine communes of the former Kibuye prefecture. A path to the hilltop retraces the fight, and monuments in the garden are made of the spears and stones the victims used to defend themselves. Bisesero stands for every place where people died resisting.

Sources: UNESCO World Heritage listing 1586 and its ICOMOS evaluation (2023).

More places of memory

Ntarama Bugesera District, Eastern Province

A small church where thousands of people who came for refuge were killed. Their clothes and belongings are still inside.

Nyange Ngororero District, Western Province

In April 1994, more than 2,000 Tutsi sheltering in the parish church were killed when the church was bulldozed onto them. The UN tribunal convicted the parish priest of genocide. Fulgence Kayishema, a police inspector accused of planning the massacre, was arrested in South Africa in 2023 after 22 years on the run.

Gatwaro and Ngoma Karongi District, Western Province

Two memorial museums of the former Kibuye prefecture that, like Bisesero, were designed by the Rwandan architect Vedaste Ngarambe around local mourning customs. Omar Ndizeye and his colleagues studied all three in 2025 (see below).

The commune office, Butare My story

A memorial now stands a few meters from the mass grave near the commune office where my mother and sisters were killed with hundreds of others on April 26, 1994. Read what happened there.

Visiting a memorial

  • These are graves first. Speak quietly and dress as you would for a funeral.
  • Some sites display human remains. Prepare students beforehand, and let anyone step outside when they need to.
  • Ask before taking photos.
  • Start at Gisozi in Kigali for the history, then visit at least one site outside the city.
  • April 7 to July 15 is the national period of mourning. Visiting then is deeply moving, but sites are busy with ceremonies.

What researchers have found

Survivors built the first memorials

Most of Rwanda’s memorials were first put up by survivors, supported by their communities, out of the urgent need to bury their dead. The national memorial system came later. Rachel Ibreck’s study of survivors’ role in memorials (2010) and the work of Omar Ndizeye and his colleagues both document this.

Memorials built around Rwandan mourning

Anna-Marie de Beer, Stephanie Wolfe and Omar Ndizeye studied the memorial museums of Bisesero, Gatwaro and Ngoma. They found that the architect Vedaste Ngarambe shaped them around the landscape and local mourning customs, so that they serve at once as burial sites, places of memory and places of healing.

Should remains stay on display?

Rwanda keeps some remains and damaged buildings as they were, as evidence of the genocide. UNESCO’s advisers called the displays highly vulnerable and recommended that the remains receive a decent burial. Many survivors want the same. Read what survivors say.

Mapping the killing sites

Omar Ndizeye, a genocide survivor, published an interactive Atlas of Genocide against Tutsi Killing Sites on ArcGIS in 2022, part of his long project “Journey through Rwandan Memorials.”

What many survivors say

Many survivors oppose putting the remains of their loved ones on display, and I am one of them. Individual survivors and the organizations that represent us have criticized the practice for years. Above all, survivors were never asked whether they wanted their mothers, fathers and children shown behind glass or laid out on a memorial floor.

We have lost a say in other ways too. A 2016 law made genocide memorials national public heritage, run by the state, and the government has since been merging district memorials into fewer, larger sites. Many local memorials that survivors built with their own hands have been moved or closed, cutting families off from the places where their loved ones rest.

My view

The government uses these displays to win sympathy abroad. It turns the memory of the genocide against the Tutsi into a tool to hold on to power, the same way it uses the genocide itself. I have raised these concerns on this blog many times, because they come down to one thing: survivors have too little say over the memory of their own families.

Albert Gasake

Read more: UNESCO recognition of Rwanda’s genocide memorials: what it means for survivors (2023).

Hear survivors

Keep exploring

The 101 Survivors in numbers Fugitive tracker My story

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