Collaborating to preserve and disseminate testimonies of child survivors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda

Many outstanding collections in many institutions in Africa have for a long time remained hidden and inaccessible. One such collection comprised 1000 handwritten testimonies by children from Gitarama prefecture who survived the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and lived to narrate first-hand about of what they each experienced from the time the genocide started until the time each one of them got rescued. Some of them go on to narrate about their life after the genocide. Unfortunately, documenting testimonies of children who survived the 1994 genocide in Rwanda has tended not to be extensive nor systematic. However, IBUKA, the umbrella organization of associations of survivors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was one of the few institutions to collect close to 1000 handwritten testimonies of children from Gitarama Prefecture, which had been one of the major killing fields. This is one of the largest collection of testimonies of children who survived this genocide. Since these testimonies were collected in late 1999 through early 2000, they have remained inaccessible. This paper explores how IBUKA and University of South Florida libraries collaborated and used relatively inexpensive technology to digitize and disseminate these handwritten testimonies.