To commemorate the 1 million people who fell victim to the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994, Antonia Beck-Mannagetta, Magdalene El-Shamy, M. Deniz Kanbalakoglu, Josephine Löschner, Laura Steindorf, Isabella Tatschl, Rob Tibke, and Katharina Wiesmayer, all students from the course Rwanda 1994: Humanity’s Collective Memory(cide) 30 Years Later, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature, created an exhibition that was opened at the Department of African Studies on Tuesday, April 9, 2024. The opening featured a moment of silence, poetry reading, music, a guided tour through the exposition, words of gratitude by Ms. Betty Dusenge, second counsellor to the Rwandan Ambassador in Switzerland, who came to Vienna for this important commemoration, and conversations on our shared history.

I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to everyone who contributed to this commemoration and everyone who came to the opening. I invite people who could not come to visit the exhibition, at best together with another student’s project (Debatten um Dekolonisierung und Rassismen, Schnittpunkt Afrika 2022) during our regular office hours: Institut für Afrikawissenschaften (univie.ac.at).

If you wish to visit as a group and be guided through the exhibition, kindly let us know two months before the planned visit so that we can arrange a guided tour.

Here are some impressions of the opening for which I sincerely thank Anna Hell (photos), Nathi Nkosinathi Dlamini (sound engineer), and Topoke Kolo Mboka (video).

It has been a privilege and an unforgettable experience to co-teach these students, learn from them, and especially to see how much talent there is in students, just waiting to be given creative spaces in courses.

Rémi Armand Tchokothe