Pioneering study of the role of the Christian churches in the
Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi; a key work for historians, memory
studies scholars, religion scholars and Africanists. Why did some
sectors of the Rwandan churches adopt an ambiguous attitude towards
the genocide against the Tutsi which claimed the lives of around
800,000 people in three months between April and July 1994? What
prevented the churches' acceptance that they may have had some
responsibility? And how should we account for the efforts made by
other sectors of the churches to remember and commemorate the
genocide and rebuild pastoral programmes? Drawing on interviews
with genocide survivors, Rwandans in exile, missionaries and
government officials, as well as Church archives and other sources,
this book is the first academic study on Christianity and the
genocide against the Tutsi to explore these contentious questions
in depth, and reveals more internal diversity within the Christian
churches than is often assumed. While some Christians, Protestant
as well as Catholic, took risks to shelter Tutsi people, others
uncritically embraced the interim government's view that the Tutsi
were enemies of the people and some, even priests and pastors,
assisted the killers. The church leaders only condemned the war:
they never actually denounced the genocide against the Tutsi.
Focusing on the period of the genocide in 1994 and the subsequent
years (up to 2000), Denis examines in detail the responses of two
churches, the Catholic Church, the biggest and the most complex,
and the Presbyterian Church in Rwanda, which made an unconditional
confession of guilt in December 1996. A case study is devoted to
the Catholic parish La Crete Congo-Nil in western Rwanda, led at
the time by the French priest Gabriel Maindron, a man whom genocide
survivors accuse of having failed publicly to oppose the genocide
and of having close links with the authorities and some of the
perpetrators. By 1997, the defensive attitude adopted by many
Catholics had started to change. The Extraordinary Synod on
Ethnocentricity in 1999-2000 was a milestone. Yet, especially in
the immediate aftermath of the genocide, tension and suspicion
persist. Fountain: Rwanda, Uganda
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