The river Akagera flows gently today, its waters glinting beneath the morning sun, whispering to the reeds that line its path. But beneath its placid surface lies a silence too heavy to ignore—an echo of pain that stirs with every ripple. I come here not as a tourist nor a wanderer, but as a keeper of memory.
Each year, I return to these banks, feet sinking into the damp soil where so many stories were cut short. I listen—because I must. I hear voices that once cried out not in anger, but in confusion, in disbelief. Tutsi families, torn from homes, marched to this river under a sky that once promised peace. Children clung to their mothers, elders whispered prayers, and the waters swallowed them all.
This river, once a giver of life, became a corridor of death during the genocide of 1994. The killers called it a shortcut—”throw them into Akagera, let the current carry them away.” They thought that water would wash away their deeds, erase the evidence, silence the names. But the river remembers. And so do we.
I see faces in the current. Young boys who dreamt of school, girls who sang to the rhythm of the rain, fathers with calloused hands from working the land, mothers with eyes like dusk. Their dreams drift with the water, their laughter caught in the rustle of papyrus.
I kneel and touch the water. It is cool, indifferent, but I speak aloud the names I know, and the names I never learned. I speak them for the families still searching, for the bones never found, for the dignity denied. I speak them because silence would be betrayal.
In the distance, a new generation plays. Their voices float like birdsong, unburdened by memory. But even they must know—must be told—that peace was not born from forgetting. It was carved from remembrance, from truth, from the sacred promise: never again.
So I return, year after year, to hear the voices on the banks of Akagera. They speak not only of death, but of resilience. They remind me that the water carries not just sorrow, but hope. That even from bloodied currents, a nation can rise.
And still, the river flows. But we, the living, must not forget.
