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This morning, 25 years to the day, I was able to visit the exact location in the Kigali neighbourhood of Gikondo where the deaths of Gabriel Kagaba and his daughter Justine Mukangango were preserved forever in news footage captured by British journalist Nick Hughes. This important piece of footage, which I have called The Genocide Video, marked one of the only instances of a death during the genocide being captured by a news camera. Think about that. Close to 1 million people were killed, in public, in the space of 100 days and there are only one or two instances of the killings being captured on camera. To my mind, that speaks volumes about the fact that there were so few journalists on the ground in Rwanda in April of 1994 that we very nearly missed the story. And even when we did see the act of genocide on TV, in footage like that captured by Nick Hughes, we simply turned away, unable to comprehend that we were looking at genocide. Years later, I was able to identify the victims in the Hughes footage as Gabriel and his daughter Justine and also found their surviving family members, including Rosalie Uzamukunda, who lost her husband and daughter that day. I documented the story of The Genocide Video in an article at the time in the Toronto Star [https://www.thestar.com/…/the_father_... ] The story of the video is also revisited in a chapter in my new book from CIGI Press: Media and Mass Atrocity: The Rwanda Genocide and Beyond. Today, I will join the Kagaba family as they visit the memorial site where the remains of their family members are buried and mourn the loss that tore the fabric of their family, a quarter century ago.
