Sainte-Famille Church

Sainte-Famille (Holy Family Church) is an active Catholic church in Muhima, downtown Kigali, and one of the genocide's most painfully documented sites. The building itself is unremarkable, but its history during April and May 1994 is devastating — a place of supposed sanctuary that became a killing ground. Visiting gives a different kind of understanding than the Genocide Memorial: a specific location where individual betrayal played out at scale.

The church is open for services and visitors are welcome outside of mass times. There is no formal memorial or guided interpretation on site, which makes the visit more unsettling in some ways than the official memorial. It is a ten-minute walk from the Mille Collines, and many people visit both in the same morning.

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During the genocide, the church became a refuge for thousands of Tutsi civilians. The priest allowed Interahamwe militias to enter and select victims from among those sheltering inside. Thousands were killed on the church grounds. The priest was later convicted of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

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