Sure you can speak about freewill
written by mmk , April 20, 2009

Sure Carl Wilkens can speak of God giving man free will and yes of course each machete stroke was in its own way a choice. But it would behoove him and the writer of this article to also ponder institutional responsibility: the role of the Christian church in Rwandan political history; its role in propagating and promoting and spreading racialist ideas; its craving for political power from the days of missionaries at the court to Bishops wedded to the Habyarimana regime; it's role on the racialist 'revolution' of 1959; the priests like Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka of Saint Famille who killed or led their parishioners to their deaths; the priests who gave absolution to killers; and the list goes on.

Take a look at Father Athanase Seromba of the Parish of Nyange in Kibuye and how he treated the people who came to his church seeking protection (African Rights. Seromba Charge Sheet No. 2, p. 6):
'Someone asked him: “Father, can’t you pray for us?” He replied: “Is the God of the Tutsis still alive?” Someone else said to him: “Aren’t you concerned about these children soiling the altar…?” He answered: “You can go and shit on the altar if you want to, because I won’t be celebrating mass on it ever again.”'

Then the massacre started.

It is all very well to celebrate the Christian message of forgiveness and to remind people of free will but the loud silence on the institutional complicities and the impact of Christian symbolism and narrative in the genocide and in the politics that led to it suggests either total ignorance or complicity with evil.

hasty generalisation
written by Daniel.Waweru , April 20, 2009

MMK,

Interesting comment. I understand you to be wanting to say that the Rwandan Church was at least partly responsible for the genocide, and that it was responsible because of the actual content of Christian belief. Christian belief and symbolism, you claim, contributed in some way to the genocide.

I\'ll concede the (contributory) institutional responsibility of the Catholic church in Rwanda.

It remains quite tricky to show that there\'s something internal to Christianity that makes genocide (or anyway serious ethnic violence) more likely. The argument in your comment moves from one, admittedly very troubling, case to conclusions about the impact of Christian symbolism and narrative in themselves. If (the content of) Christianity as such did make ethnic violence more likely, then the effect would be general: it would show up in a bunch of cases, not just in Rwanda. A brief rummage through the history of genocide suggests that religion and mass ethnic violence are ambiguously related: sometimes it\'s a factor, sometimes it isn\'t. That\'s even more true of Christian belief. If so, the Rwandan case won\'t, on its own, make the case you want.

Further, very interesting new research suggests that the key driver of ethnic conflict in diverse societies is the exclusion from state power and attendant benefits of parts of the population on ethnic grounds.

...
written by mmk , April 20, 2009

The Rwanda genocide is not a case study Daniel. That is a very important start to grappling with it and not making it one of a series of proofs to establish some kind of case of cases. That it even strikes you as a 'case' in the pursuit of a proof reflects THE moral position taken when Africans die: that of establishing causes so as to I suppose roll out solutions... But before we can make of it a case study or in your words before we move from 'from one, admittedly very troubling, case to conclusions', I suggest we look at that very case and give it is momentous due. Do not see it as an aside on your way to making some kind of brave BIG point.

By calling on a focus on the Catholic Church as an institution and its role in the genocide, I was doing more than calling for a 'legal' case to be made against the church. The very structure of morality in Rwandan life is called into question, the normative relationships in the private and public realm are left shattered. Your columnist was repeating a devastatingly effective Catholic Church PR strategy that followed '94: it is not for us to question the Church but rather to ask why individuals turned away from the Church and its principles. This is an obscene position for the very church that protected that priest who I quote - protected and gave him a job in Europe after '94 - to take this kind of position. Then I have a deep suspicion of the narrative of uplift and forgiveness that has been trotted out in a country where 800,000 people were killed with a massive number murdered inside churches by tens of thousands of regular church goers and with a church hierarchy that was in bed with a genocidal regime in a country whose colonial rule was fundamentally reliant on Catholic missionary activity... No, no, it is not that easy to deal with the case or to move past it with a breezy use of it as a 'proof'. Look at it more closely.

causality versus correlation
written by mmk , April 20, 2009

I am not interested in claiming Christianity was a cause for the genocide - in fact I do not think it was. I am not trying to score some kind of point against the Catholic Church ala the Dawkins and Hitchens of the world. I am however trying to put a brake on the kind of sidestep that the church has tried to carry out in Rwanda. The Catholic Church in Rwanda has always been far more than a place you go to on Sundays to pray: it is a deeply political institution and has been since the very beginning. From its (mostly successful) attempt to become the court religion to the mwami, to its production of the founders of Hutu Power in its seminaries, the role of individual missionaries who wrote ethnographies that attempted to substantiate the Hamitic myth, to its role in setting Hutu elite versus Hutu elite, the church is far more than a religious institution in Rwandan life. Look at a map of Rwanda right now. A huge number - perhaps even the majority - of the towns you see on the map were built around mission stations so that the very political geography of Rwanda is deeply written by the Church. And so on and so forth.

Rwanda deserves to be taken on its own merits and the genocide there treated with due attention and respect, not merely as yet another in a long line of 'African pathologies' that must be diagnosed and rooted out with the usual tools.

unsure about strategy
written by Daniel.Waweru , April 20, 2009

I'm still not sure I understand the precise beef with the Church in Rwanda.

Your view, I think, is that the Church was deeply caught up in the structure of the pre-genocide state and administration; and in the structure of pre-genocide power and authority (in state and the society). Further, it didn't only offer suppor tor justification for: the Church was at least partly responsible for their creation.

You want, in short, to say, that there's something about the genocide for which the Church is responsible. The problem is the distance of the Rwandan institutional church from the state.

If your view is sound, then the Rwandan Church is virtually indistinguishable from the ideological branch of the Rwandan state -- now favouring this side, now that. But then the argument is robbed of much of its interest. The closer the relation between the Rwandan state and the Church, the less interesting is the role of the Rwandan church. The closer the relation between the Rwandan state and the Church, the likelier is the Church's behaviour to be explained by the interests and actions of the faction of the Rwandan state which had captured it, than by anything particular to the Church.

To make life difficult for the Church, or for Jesse's prescription of Xtianity, or for the claim that Rwandans failed the Church (rather than that the Church failed them) the Church must have had some signifcant independence of the state. For the Church to have been seriously culpable for the genocide, there must have been some chance that the (institutional Rwandan) Church could have remained independent during it. Then it's easy to see how to raise difficult questions about the contribution of Christianity as such for the violence, or for Jesse's thoughts about the importance of Xtianity for the future.

Surprisingly if you're going for the angle that the Church in Rwanda was virtually a branch of the state, then it turns out that there's no very interesting question about the culpability of Xtianity itself for the genocide in Rwanda.

...
written by mmk , April 20, 2009

On the matter of memory, trauma and atrocity - many Africans, and particularly Kenyans, have yet to shape language that allow us to debate and explore the relationship between violence and our public realms. The tools that most of us use to come to grips with violent conflict - particularly we children of the elite - are the noblesse oblige ones of humanitarian inquiry, diagnosis and policy response. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with these - it is just that we are at sea when it comes to generating political responses to events such as the Rwanda genocide. This means for example that few African publics have responded as publics to violence in Darfur or Eastern Congo in the same way that we managed to do with apartheid. Europeans and Americans can muster crowds in the thousands around these issues. It is not that they are any more moral or 'concerned' than we are, they just have a way of thinking about atrocity and its relation to their political that allows their outrage to transcend individual sensibility.


When it comes to Rwanda, many of us are in a great rush to find causes and assign responsibilities without actually being sure what it is they are trying to find these for; do you actually know what happened beyond the numbers and the few clips and the handful of films produced about it? There is more to genocide than a mountain of bodies and more meaning and truth to be uncovered than whether 'ethnicity' or 'corruption' or privatization caused it.

The Church was not a branch of the Rwandan state, it is strange you read me claiming that: what I wrote was that the church was a political institution and here it would do to (rarely) invoke Foucault and his insight that there is more to the state than the state when he speaks of governmentality. What you are doing with some cleverness is to try and split hairs - state or not, this cause or that one - and totally missing the immensity of what happened in Rwanda between 1904 and 1994. Like I said, focus closer, do not rush off immediately to question ethnicity (this is not even what we are dealing with in Rwanda!) or the 'lessons' to be learnt in Kenya or someplace.

The Rwandan genocide has become a case study for postgraduate classes in International Relations: what did the UN do wrong they ask; did Clinton know; what is it about ethnicity others wonder. It is possible in Africa to connect within a single page or two the death of millions: from Congo to Rwanda to Biafra to Eldoret to Angola. It is bad states and ethnicity and fights for resources and power and bad leaders and privatizers or nationalisers. The explanations are so pat, the solutions so canned and intellectual honesty and courage lacking. Read these words again and reflect on them a bit before rushing off to connect the African powerpoint dots:

'Someone asked him: “Father, can’t you pray for us?” He replied: “Is the God of the Tutsis still alive?” Someone else said to him: “Aren’t you concerned about these children soiling the altar…?” He answered: “You can go and shit on the altar if you want to, because I won’t be celebrating mass on it ever again.”'

the process of Genocide
written by n* , April 20, 2009

daniel, i actually do not think that mmk is suggesting that Christian symbolism and narrative in generalcontribute to acts of mass violence and crimes against humanity. rather, what is being said is--in addition to recognizing the institutional responsibility of the church before and during the Genocide--one cannot examine this issue, in any depth, without also taking into account the impact of Christian symbolism and narrative on creating an atmosphere and a society conducive to Genocide. (mmk, please correct me if i'm wrong)

it is clear that religion cannot be blamed for what happened, in Rwanda. but evidence has shown that the agenda of the leadership of the Catholic Church and that of the Government at the time was inextricably intertwined. there is indeed a tendency to side-step the fact that people's faith and beliefs were actually preyed upon and manipulated for generations by the Church, in tandem with political propaganda, in order to create what was essentially the process of Genocide. it wasn't an act. it was not isolated. it was a continuous process. and part of the systematic nature of what happened in 1994 was the creation and cultivation of a Genocide ideology and the Catholic Church must be credited with perpetuating this ideology through manipulation of Christian imagery and narrative.

...
written by Daniel.Waweru , April 21, 2009

daniel, i actually do not think that mmk is suggesting that Christian symbolism and narrative in general contribute to acts of mass violence and crimes against humanity. rather, what is being said is--in addition to recognizing the institutional responsibility of the church before and during the Genocide--one cannot examine this issue, in any depth, without also taking into account the impact of Christian symbolism and narrative on creating an atmosphere and a society conducive to Genocide. (mmk, please correct me if i'm wrong)

The generality is a test. If the Xtian symbolism were the cause (or at least part of the cause) then, since there's a lot of Xtian symbolism and narrative about, you'd expect to see rather more Rwandas; you'd expect the worst ethnic violence where Christian symbolism narrative etc, is taken most seriously; and you'd expect less ethnic violence where there was less Xtianity.

At least in Africa, that doesn't seem to be the case. There's been genocidal violence with (Rwanda, Congo) and without (Darfur) the involvement of Xtians. There doesn't seem to be very much of a correlation between the intensity of Xtian belief and the likelihood of violence. And, as I say, there's interestign new research which shows an alternative cause for serious ethnic violence in diverse societies.

Antisemitism is useful conterpoint. There does seem to be some tight connection between (at least some forms of) Xtianity and antisemitism: ideological antisemtism was widespread in Xtian parts of the world, and basically absent elsewhere; and Xtian-on-Jew violence varied, at least some of the time, with the fervour of Xtian religious belief.

again the correlations and causations
written by mmk , April 21, 2009

Daniel,

You are not reading what I am saying, so anxious are you to make your points on correlation and causation. The reason you even need to make this point is unclear. I am done with this particular thread. Peace.