I don’t understand this
. There are a hundred million things to write about here—me and my professional compatriots are trying to get a humble few of them into print, and no one cares. But the AP bothers to write, and the International Herald Tribune bothers to print, a lengthy piece on visitors to genocide sites.
It’s not just that it’s the most obvious thing you could possibly write about here. It’s not just that a story on visiting genocide sites does almost nothing more than rehash the same story everyone writes from here, with some hotel addresses at the end. It’s that it’s so clear that this is a non-story that it starts this way:
Visiting places famous for death is nothing new. You can tour the Nazi concentration camps of Dachau in Germany and Auschwitz in Poland, or the killing fields of Choeung Ek in Cambodia. Tourists sought glimpses of the World Trade Center ruins within days of the Sept. 11th attacks.
Rwanda is another destination where visitors can bear witness to the mass slaughter of innocents….”
And it’s not just this is a lame way to start a non-story. It’s that the sentence sounds so cold and inhuman, as if Rwanda were just another destination where…
People visit Ground Zero too, and like, taking smiling pictures in front of the hole.
People love death. It doesn’t matter where it is or what the context was.
Hi Jina, nice to know you are back in Kigali, well I subscribes for your notes and must say I was moved by the bit where they got you from the crowd and took you to the tent because…you’re white. You shouldn’t have crossed that line on grounds of being white, you should have stayed because once you did then you lost out on so much as a journalist. I advise you to read a Ryzsard Kapuscinski’s book Shadow of the sun. This Polish fellow is credited as one of the best to have graced Africa in the 50’s up to the 70’s.
He urges journalists to always lay with the crowd so us to hear their stories. Trust me if you’d stayed the above piece would have been longer.
I would have lent you my copy of the book but the guy I lent it to is still refusing to return it and he is now in Arusha TZ.