Three days in Kigali: the tidiest capital in Africa, and the most honest
Two nights across Kigali's hills, with the memorial at Gisozi, a walking tour of Nyamirambo, the city's best market and art centre, and the German house the whole place grew from.
- Length
- 3 days, 2 nights
- Where you stay
- Kigali
- Places
- 6 across 3 days
Kigali is spread over a series of steep ridges at about 1,500 metres, so almost every street is either climbing or falling and almost every window has a view of another hill with houses on it. It was a colonial administrative post of a few thousand people when Rwanda became independent in 1962, and it has grown into a city of well over a million in a country the size of Wales. It is also, by common agreement, the cleanest and best organised capital on the continent: no litter, no plastic bags, working traffic lights, and a compulsory monthly community clean-up that shuts the shops until midday.
The order is not decoration. Between April and July 1994, in about a hundred days, several hundred thousand Rwandans were murdered in a genocide organised by the state and carried out largely by neighbours. Kigali was where the killing was directed from and where a great deal of it happened, and the city today is built on a policy of remembering it precisely and publicly. The Kigali Genocide Memorial at Gisozi is the national record of that, and more than 250,000 people are buried in its grounds.
Three days is enough, and it is a strange three days: a heavy morning that everybody who comes here should give, then a city that is genuinely a pleasure to walk around, full of good coffee, art studios, brilliant markets and people who will talk to you. Most visitors come through on their way to the gorillas in the northwest. The city deserves better than an airport transfer.
Highlights
- The Genocide Memorial at Gisozi, the national record of 1994 and the best-made museum in the region
- Nyamirambo, the oldest and loudest quarter, walked with the women who run a centre in it
- Kimironko market, where the tailors will make you something from the fabric you just bought
- Inema Arts Centre, a working studio complex rather than a gallery, with the artists usually in
Where to stay
Kigali, two nights
The city has no single centre in the way most capitals do. There is a downtown of banks and offices on one ridge, a government quarter on another at Kacyiru, a diplomatic and residential belt at Kiyovu and Nyarutarama, and the old, dense, mostly Muslim quarter of Nyamirambo across a valley to the southwest. The green strips in between are wetland, some of it now protected and replanted, which is why a city of a million feels like a series of villages that can see each other.
It is a young city. Richard Kandt, a German doctor who became the colony's first resident, built his house here in the early 1900s, and it was still a small town when the Belgians handed the country over in 1962. Almost everything you see was built in the last thirty years, and most of it in the last fifteen, which is visible in the glass towers going up along the ridge and in the fact that the road surfaces are better than in most European capitals.
What visitors notice first is how ordered it is, and the second thing they notice is how consistently friendly it is to be a stranger in. Both of those are real. The country's politics are tightly controlled and people are careful about what they say to outsiders, which is also real, and worth knowing before you assume a quiet answer means agreement.
Day by day
Day 1 in Kigali
Kimironko market and the studios at Inema
Start at Kimironko, the biggest and best market in the city and one of the most enjoyable in East Africa. It is covered, orderly and enormous: pyramids of tomatoes and avocados, sacks of beans and dried fish, a whole hall of secondhand clothes, and at the back the fabric section, where bolts of printed cotton are stacked to the ceiling. Buy a length of kitenge, take it to one of the tailors sitting at treadle machines a few metres away, and it will come back as a shirt or a dress in a day or two. Prices are negotiated and the negotiation is good-natured.
In the afternoon, Inema Arts Centre in Kacyiru. Two brothers set it up in a converted house and it now works as studio space for a dozen or so Rwandan artists, most of whom are there, painting, on any given afternoon. The work is for sale, the prices are on it, and nobody follows you round. There is a garden bar at the back and usually a drumming or dance session on Thursday evenings.
That is a deliberately gentle first day. Tomorrow is not.
- 14:30
Kimironko market
OtherCovered, huge and easy to navigate. Go for the fabric hall and the tailors behind it. An hour and a half, cash only.
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- 16:45
Inema Arts Centre
CultureA working studio complex in Kacyiru, open daily, free to walk into. The artists are usually at their easels in the afternoon.
- 19:30
Dinner and a Rwandan coffee
EatBrochettes of goat with grilled plantain, then a coffee. Rwanda exports nearly all of its best beans, but the cafes in Kigali have got hold of some.
With more time: Caplaki Craft Village is the organised place to buy carvings, baskets and imigongo, the black and white cow-dung geometric painting that is uniquely Rwandan, and the restored wetland at Nyandungu has 120 hectares of boardwalk and birds twenty minutes from the centre.
Day 2 in Kigali
Gisozi, Camp Kigali, and an afternoon in Nyamirambo
Go to the Kigali Genocide Memorial first thing. It opened in April 2004, on the tenth anniversary, on a hillside at Gisozi, above the concrete terraces where the dead were reburied. The permanent exhibition takes you through the colonial invention of Hutu and Tutsi as fixed racial categories, the decades of pogroms that followed independence, the organisation of the killing in 1994, and the international decision not to intervene. Upstairs there is a room of photographs brought in by families and a room about children, which is the one that undoes people. Take the audio guide, allow at least two hours, and do not schedule anything demanding immediately afterwards.
Camp Kigali, near the centre, is a short second stop. Ten Belgian UN peacekeepers were disarmed and killed here on the first day of the genocide while guarding the prime minister, and their deaths triggered the Belgian withdrawal and then the collapse of the UN mission. Ten stone columns stand in the yard, one for each man, cut with a line for every year he had lived. The building they died in still has the bullet holes in it.
Then cross the valley to Nyamirambo, and change register completely. It is the oldest quarter of the city, largely Muslim, dense and noisy in a way the rest of Kigali is not, with barbers, tailors, mosques and music. The Nyamirambo Women's Centre, set up by a group of local women, runs a walking tour through it that ends with lunch cooked in somebody's house, and it is the best-spent three hours in Kigali.
- 09:00
The Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre
HistoricFree entry, small charge for the audio guide, and worth every minute of two hours. Photography is not allowed inside the exhibition.
- 12:00
Belgian Peacekeepers Memorial
HistoricTen stone columns in the yard of the old barracks, and the building itself. Twenty minutes, and a guide is usually available.
- 13:30
Nyamirambo Women's Center
VisitBook the walking tour a day or two ahead. Three hours through the quarter with lunch included, run by the women who live there.
With more time: The Campaign Against Genocide Museum, in the parliament building, tells the other half of the story from the point of view of the force that ended it, and the Presidential Palace Museum on the airport road has the wreckage of Habyarimana's aircraft still lying in the garden where it came down in April 1994.
Day 3 in Kigali
The Kandt House, and the road out
The Kandt House is among the oldest buildings in Kigali and the reason there is a Kigali at all. Richard Kandt was a German doctor and explorer who spent years looking for the source of the Nile, decided this ridge was the right place for an administrative post, and built here in the first decade of the twentieth century. His house is now a museum covering Rwanda's geology, wildlife and pre-colonial society, with a section on the German and Belgian periods that is more direct than most former colonies manage. There are snakes and crocodiles in the yard, which children find more interesting than any of the above.
The terrace behind it has one of the better views over the downtown ridge, and the walk down from there into the old commercial streets is short and rewarding if you have the time and the legs for the climb back.
Then the airport, which is twenty minutes away and where nothing goes wrong. If instead you are heading north for the gorillas, the drive to Musanze and Volcanoes National Park takes two to three hours through terraced hillsides that are worth staying awake for.
- 09:15
Kandt House Museum
CultureAn hour and a half for the museum and the terrace view. Ticketed, and combined tickets with other national museums are available.
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- 13:00
Onward to the airport or the volcanoes
TravelTwenty minutes to Kigali International, or between two and three hours northwest to Musanze if the gorillas are next.
With more time: With a spare afternoon, the hills around Kigali are laced with walking routes through eucalyptus and terraced farmland, and Lake Muhazi is an hour east for a long lunch by the water on the way to nowhere in particular.
Before you go
Getting in and out
Kigali International sits at Kanombe, about 5 km east of the centre, and is small, calm and quick. RwandAir flies from London, Brussels, Doha, Johannesburg and across Africa, and KLM, Brussels Airlines, Qatar and Turkish all serve it. Ride-hailing cars from the terminal cost a few thousand francs and take twenty minutes.
Plastic bags are illegal in Rwanda and the ban is enforced at the airport, where bags are checked on arrival. Bring cloth or paper, and repack anything wrapped in polythene before you fly.
Rwanda issues visas on arrival to every nationality, and the East Africa Tourist Visa covers Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya on one application. Buses run to Kampala in about ten hours and to the Ugandan border in three, and the road to Volcanoes National Park takes a little over two hours.
Where to stay
Kiyovu and Nyarutarama hold most of the hotels and guesthouses, both of them quiet, leafy and a short ride from everything on these three days. Kiyovu is closer to the centre and to the Camp Kigali memorial; Nyarutarama is greener and further out.
Kacyiru, up near the government quarter, is convenient for the Gisozi memorial and has a good spread of mid-range places. Nyamirambo, southwest, is the most interesting neighbourhood in the city and has the fewest rooms in it.
The distances are small in every direction. Nowhere in Kigali is more than about twenty minutes from anywhere else outside rush hour, so pick on atmosphere rather than on the map.
Getting around
Moto-taxis are the fastest and cheapest way across the city, they are everywhere, and by law both rider and passenger wear a helmet, which is not true of the neighbouring countries. App-based motos remove the haggling and are the easiest option for a visitor.
Two ride-hailing car apps operate here and both work exactly as you would expect, paid by card or mobile money. A car costs several times a moto and is still very cheap.
Walking is pleasant and safe by day if you can handle the gradients, and the pavements are real ones. Between neighbourhoods it is a long climb down and a longer one up, so walk within a quarter and ride between them.
Umuganda, money and manners
On the last Saturday of every month, from early morning until about midday, the country stops for umuganda, a compulsory session of community work. Shops close, traffic is restricted and most museums do not open until the afternoon. It is worth knowing before you plan a Saturday, and worth seeing if you happen to be here.
The Rwandan franc is the currency, mobile money is universal and cards work in hotels and better restaurants. Tipping is not expected and rounding up is enough.
Rwandans are formal and courteous with strangers: greet people before asking anything. Do not photograph government buildings, and be careful about photographing people without asking. The words Hutu and Tutsi are not used casually here, and questions about somebody's background are not a conversation to open with.
Kigali is a small city that asks something of you. The morning at Gisozi is not optional if you want to understand anything about Rwanda, and the afternoon in Nyamirambo is the necessary other half: a country that decided what it was going to do with its history rather than pretending it did not have one.
From here the road north climbs to Musanze and the volcanoes, where the gorilla treks leave from and where the terraced fields run up to the tree line. West is Lake Kivu, at Gisenyi or Kibuye, which is warm, blue and completely unlike everything else in the country. South, at Huye, is the national museum with the best ethnographic collection in Rwanda, and beyond it Nyungwe, a montane rainforest full of chimpanzees and colobus.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- Is Kigali worth a stop, or just a gateway to the gorillas?
- Worth a stop, and two nights is the right amount. The memorial at Gisozi is the reason and it needs a whole morning. Beyond that, the market, Nyamirambo and the art studios make a genuinely enjoyable day, and the city is easy and safe to move around in a way that is unusual in the region.
- How difficult is the Genocide Memorial to visit?
- It is direct and it is hard, particularly the children's room upstairs. It is also carefully made, not sensational, and there are counsellors on site. Give it a morning, leave the afternoon light, and do not take young children through the main exhibition.
- Is Kigali safe?
- It is one of the safest capitals in Africa for a visitor, day or night, with very little street crime and a heavy police presence. Ordinary care with pockets in a crowded market is about the extent of it. Do not photograph soldiers or government buildings.
- Can I see the gorillas from Kigali?
- Volcanoes National Park is two to three hours by road, so a trek is a very early start and a long day, and it is far better done with a night in Musanze either side. Permits are limited, expensive and sold in advance through the Rwanda Development Board, so book before you book flights.
- When should I go?
- The long dry season from June to September is the most comfortable and the best for trekking, and a shorter dry spell falls around January and February. The heavy rains come in March to May, which is green, cheap and muddy. The temperature barely moves all year.
- What is umuganda and will it affect my trip?
- It is a compulsory community work morning on the last Saturday of every month, when shops shut, roads are quiet and most attractions open late. Plan that morning as a slow one, or spend it joining in, which visitors are welcome to do.