Don't look away. This is what I tell myself as I walk through the Kigali Genocide Memorial in the Rwandan capital city.
Visitors have crowded around images replete with dead bodies, screens unreeling silent, staccato footage of attacks, reams of text telling the story of that day in April 1994 when evil descended on this country.
But this is not a voyeuristic gore-fest. The memorial to the victims of Rwanda's genocide, in which more than one million Tutsis were slaughtered over a 100-day period by their Hutu countrymen — even as the UN was alerted to events — offers just enough of the horror to hold people's attention.
And it is the repository of such a superfluity of victims' smiling faces and their heartbreaking stories that leaves visitors questioning how it is possible for a country to turn on its own people like that — and a world to turn its face away from the unfolding horror.
This is the urgent question that atrocities (and memorials) such as this should provoke: why do humans turn into killing machines at the behest of their leaders, and when will we allow it to happen again?
Days earlier, the subject of the genocide had arisen during dinner with fellow guests at a lodge in north-western Rwanda. We had all been captivated by this country of gently rolling hills, spotlessly clean streets (plastic bags were banned here a decade ago; pavements are swept and verges weeded) and disarmingly friendly people. We were incredulous at their ability to heal themselves of unhealable wounds, to reunify just two decades after unspeakable atrocities were carried out on these same tidy streets.
None of us could imagine such wholesale slaughter occurring in our own countries. We were set apart from such warfare, mere observers of a conflict that had destroyed an entire people.
"There is no point in romanticising a country that has overcome hatred when the same old genocidal story is unfurling in some far-off location as we speak."
And yet each of us was born in a country that wouldn't have existed in its current form if not for similar brutality and repression: the US, South Africa, Australia, Britain. First peoples had been massacred, communities dispossessed of their land, empires expanded in the name of development.
Borders had been arbitrarily drawn and tribes torn asunder in the greedy quest for resources.
And let's not forget, I pointed out as our discussion continued, those people who are being exterminated this very minute, as we converse upon these blood-stained hills: Christians and Yazidis in Iraq and Syria, Rohingyas in Myanmar. There is no point in romanticising a country that has overcome hatred when the same old genocidal story is unfurling in some far-off location as we speak.
This is how we allow history to repeat itself, by compartmentalising one atrocity from another, by failing to see the patterns or connect the dots that coalesce to form an arcing human story. Few of us are disconnected from the brutality that shaped the society we live in; and by the power of technology, we are all as intimately connected as we care to be with the inhumanities unfolding in the present.
Driving to Kigali a few days later, I asked my guide a question that had been burning on my tongue since I'd met him almost two weeks earlier, and which I wasn't sure was an appropriate one to ask: Are you Tutsi or Hutu?
He paused and then answered, 'I'm Rwandan.' It was a statement that exemplifies life in post-genocide Rwanda: in the decades since, the country has removed tribal affiliations from people's identity documents and worked hard to unify them and so guard against further bloodshed.
But after a brief silence, my guide spoke again. He was ten years old during the genocide, he said, and he escaped to Uganda with his Tutsi mother and siblings. His father and older brother stayed behind to look after their cattle. They were murdered.
'It happened, now we are looking forward,' he said. 'We are trying to rebuild our country again.'
And then, in an echo of that lesson that seems to elude us all: 'Always we say, "never again", but it is happening in Syria, it is happening in South Sudan, it is happening in our neighbour, Burundi.'
And so don't look away, I remind myself. We must never look away.
Catherine Marshall is a Sydney-based journalist and travel writer.
Main image: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev visit to Kigali Genocide Memorial (Kigali Genocide Memorial via Flickr)