DESTINATION HIGHLIGHTS

FESTIVALS & EVENTS

Kwita Izina

If you’re looking to get out of the big city and back into nature, the annual Kwita Izina gorilla-naming ceremony is a special time to visit Volcanoes National Park. The annual naming ceremony takes place in Kinigi, but visitors can also join a several-day guided tour from Kigali running up to the main event, where they’ll get to meet the park staff and leading conservationists, attend cultural evenings and a celebration in Musanze, tour the little-visited lakes Burero and Ruhondo, and finally attend the naming ceremony, where there’s music, dancing, and discussion on the great strides that Rwanda has made in gorilla conservation and the great challenges that remain.

Kigali UP

Since it launched in 2011, KigaliUP has rapidly become Rwanda’s premiere music festival, and one of the finest in Africa. Every year, usually during the northern summer months, they bring local and international reggae, blues, hip-hop, and pop acts to Kigali, where they thrill their equally international audience with sounds from around the world. Thousands of fans attend every year, but it’s still an intimate, personal affair, and you’re likely to catch the same people who were rocking on stage the night before giving fans a drum lesson the next morning.

Rwanda Film Festival

Better known as ‘Hillywood’, the Rwanda Film Festival has been bringing films from around Rwanda, Africa and the world to Kigali every July for more than 10 years now. While the festival is based in Kigali, they also take the show on the road to villages and towns across Rwanda, where they screen films and hold workshops for the public with their own pop-up cinema.

Hobe Rwanda Festival

Since its inception in 2013, the Hobe Rwanda Festival has become a much-loved fixture on Kigali’s cultural calendar. With a keen focus on Rwandan culture, Hobe promotes local musicians, artists and dancers with a two-day fest that usually takes place in September. International artists are represented here too, but if it’s a slice of real-life Rwandan creativity you want, Hobe is the place to be.

Fashion

Though it would have been a pipe dream some years ago, today Kigali is cosmopolitan enough to host not one, but two fashion festivals every year, and for fashionistas and those on the cutting edge of style, they offer a fantastic opportunity to see the cultural fusion of western and Rwandan styles that the country’s finest designers negotiate and create daily. Kigali Fashion Week takes place every July, and hosts dozens of international, local, and upcoming young designers, while the Rwanda Cultural Fashion Week showcases even more local and international talent every September.