January 6, 2007

I look out of the window of the EER Guest House, and I see in the foreground the towering Virunga mountain range, partially covered by mist. I am reminded of Dian Fossey and “Gorillas in the Mist,” but it is not her story that is on my mind as I look at the misty mountain range. I am thinking of the tragic events of 1994 — the Rwandan genocide.

I’m remembering a conversation I had on the plane from Brussels to Entebbe. I was reading Immaculee Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell, a memoir of how she survived the genocide, in which she lost both her parents and two brothers. The passenger seated next to me became curious about the book, and we got into a conversation about Immaculee, the genocide, and my work at the Center for Reconciliation. As we parted, he offered best wishes in “your attempt to bring reconciliation to Rwanda.” Now, as I look at the misty mountain range, and think about the fragments of that conversation, I think how strange it is that the passenger on the plane would think of my work as “bringing reconciliation.”

Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised. Reconciliation ministry is usually associated with training, skills, and techniques that lead to the resolution of a conflict or past injury. But as I stare out into the misty distance, trying to make out the mighty shape of the Virunga mountains, I realize how the challenge of overcoming violence, whether in Rwanda or elsewhere, has more to do with vision than with skills of mediation. It is, more specifically, about the recovery of a vision for God’s beautiful, magnificent, and majestic new creation, which like the Virunga range is often obscured by the mist of hatred and division. Such recovery takes the form of a journey. On this journey, together with others, we acquire the ability over time not only to name God’s vision, but also to negotiate the contradictions that so often obscure it.

Later in the day, as we drive down the winding road towards Kigali, Joseph, my guide, tells me the names of various hills. I am overwhelmed by the incredible beauty of this land of a thousand hills. And I think of the intense hatred that fueled the genocide in this beautiful land. Beauty and genocide are hard to think together. Rwandans speak the same language, have the same cultural traditions, have intermarried for generations, and live on the same hills. It would be difficult to imagine a more homogeneous country. But this is where the intense hatred between Hutu and Tutsi, a people so difficult to tell apart, errupted in the 1994 genocide.  

On the whole, Rwandans are quiet and peaceful people, hospitable and unassuming. They are a people who hate any show of arrogance or condescension. Agasuzuguro they call it, and it is the last thing a Munyarwanda will tolerate. But in 1994, all types of agasuzuguro were unleashed.

Rwanda is an overwhelmingly Christian country. But here Christians killed one another within the very churches where they had worshipped together. The fact that most of the killings where carried out during the Easter season (they started on the Thursday following Easter), is itself hard to comprehend.

What kind of madness, what kind of spell overcomes such a Christian and peace-loving people? A spell — that is, indeed, what it must have been. A spell as threatening as that which Paul speaks to the Galatians about: “you stupid Galatians, after you have beheld Christ crucified, who has cast a spell over you” (Gal 3:1) that you have reverted to your old way of living?

If the journey of reconciliation is a journey of probing contradictions between beauty and genocide, between unity and division, between new creation and old creation, it involves honestly confronting Paul’s question about spells — the many spells that hold us captive to hatred and division, preventing us from seeing the incredible beauty of God’s new creation and inhabiting our new identity in Christ.

The journey toward God’s new creation requires a critical exercise of engaging the histories and stories that form us into the identities that we claim — Hutu, Tutsi, white, black, African, American, Ugandan, Rwandan. Often these identities set us one against another, grounding us in a life of hatred and blinding us to the incredible promise and freedom of God’s new creation. Accordingly, the journey of reconciliation — which is to say, the journey of living within God’s new creation — has to do with critically facing the formative role that politics plays in shaping our desires, our visions of what is possible, and our very identities.

For an extended reflection see:
Violence And Christian Social Reconstruction In Africa: On The Resurrection Of The Body (Politic) in TheOtherJournal.com.