A few days ago, we spent one full day in Cordoba. One day, for a city of 2 million people. We took an overnight bus to get to Cordoba from Mendoza (10:30 pm to 8:00 am) and then we took another overnight bus Thursday night from Cordoba to Buenos Aires. In our one full day, we visited a lot of the museums, saw the 400 year old university there, and enjoyed the sunshine with some Malbec.
Sadly many of the museums that we visited could only be enjoyed from the outside due to a transportation strike. The transportation strike caused closures were curious because although the majority of the art museums were closed, the science museums and cultural centers were not. Another museum that was not closed and powerfully affected both me and Wilson was Cordoba's Memoria Museum. It was similar to the Santiago Museum of Memory and Human Rights that Wilson blogged about. Argentina also had brutal dictatorships propped up during the Cold War.
Cordoba's Memoria Museum specifically focused on the individuals disappeared from that region. The museum is in a former police detention center that had held and tortured the disappeared individuals. In this museum, we saw the tiny cells and the interrogation rooms. We saw the negatives of the photos that the regime had taken of those that it had disappeared. There were rooms dedicated to the 400 people who were never found. It has scrapbooks made by the families -- items owned by the people from their childhood to their guitars, dresses, and everything else that was dear. One room was designed as a nursery and shows pictures of pregnant women who were disappeared. This happened right around the time that my mom was pregnant with me -- mid and late seventies.
It was hard to leave that former police station with clear eyes. Neither of us did. As I left, I stopped to talk to the two men at the entrance who had given me the museum's program. One of the men was in exile in San Francisco during that time period and received his political asylum in the US the year that I was born. The other man had been disappeared in the mid-seventies from Cordoba. He was then imprisoned for 8 and a half years throughout Argentina. I asked him how he felt about the Museum of the Memoria and he said that working there was a testimony to what had occurred. He felt that in some way, he was providing a voice for those who had been disappeared and no longer had a voice. By the end of our conversation, we all had tears in our eyes.
This experience made me reflect on the human rights abuses that have occurred throughout the Southern African countries that we visited. Most notably, Kenya, Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Madagascar. It made me wonder why there is no memory and human rights museum in Mozambique, Malawi, and Madagacar. These three countries had regime changes from dictatorships and civil wars but, to my knowledge, do not have museums reflecting on people who were disappeared and/or killed. In Kenya and Zimbabwe, it is more complicated because the current regime has a connection to the past abuses. For Zimbabwe, President Mugabe has now been in power for more than 30 years and the current government is a shared power government. Maybe eventually there will be a Memory museum there. In Kenya, two tribes (the Kikuyu and Kalenjin) have dominated the democracy since Kenya's independance. There have been many allegations of squelching opposition with force. In fact there is a human rights' investigation into the violence surrounding the 2007 election. For example, Kenya's recently elected president, President Uhuru Kenyatta, faces charges in the International Criminal Court for his alleged role in that violence. It seems like Kenya and other African countries with a history of human rights abuses could do more to examine, investigate, and then display these human rights abuses.
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