Toxic Liberation: The Role of Catholic Social Teaching in The Genocide in Rwanda

TOXIC LIBERATION: THE ROLE OF CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHINGS IN THE GENOCIDE IN RWANDA1 TIM HORNER Abstract: This study
examines the role of Catholic Social Teachings (CST) in the Rwandan Hutu ideology of the late 1950s. By comparing the central document of this movement (The Hutu Manifesto 1957) with two of the most influential papal encyclicals of the tradition (Rerum Novarum 1891 and Qudragesimo Anno 1931), it becomes apparent that the ideas defined in these texts were central to the formation of the Hutu movement. The study goes on to show how scientific racism, endorsed by the church as well as the colonial government, combined with CST to create a toxic form of liberation. Key Words: Genocide, Rwanda, Catholic Social Teaching, Rerum Novarum, Kayibanda, Racism
Introduction
In 1994 Rwanda was 75 percent Roman Catholic and the church had a powerful and pervasive presence. The genocide in Rwanda has raised questions about the role of the Church in the Rwandan genocide. Was this a case of a few bad apples renouncing their Christian mandate to make peace and to love ones enemy, or was it a systematic failure that allowed fear and racism to be insinuated into the very fiber of the Rwandan Church?
This research was funded through the support of a 2011 Veritas Grant at Villanova University.
1 The International Journal of Conflict & Reconciliation Fall 2013, Volume 1 Number 2
In an effort to deepen an understanding of the causes of the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, this study analyzes the relationship between the Catholic tradition of social justice and the Hutu ideology in 1950s Rwanda. This connection can be seen by comparing two papal encyclicals -Rerum Novarum (1896) and Qudragessimo Anno (1936) -- with the most influential Rwandan document to come out of the Hutu movement: The Hutu Manifesto (1957). To the reader unfamiliar with papal encyclicals, it might seem incredible to put so much weight on these documents. With the exception of the Bible, how could a single voice extend into the very heart of Africa? But to anyone familiar with the place of these texts within the Catholic Social Tradition (CST), this is not a stretch. All papal encyclicals have an impact on teaching and thinking within the Catholic Church, but these particular documents stand out as seminal. In particular, Rerum Novarum and Quadregessimo Anno are considered the urtexts of modern Catholic Social Teaching. Even in their time, they were considered radical and highly important. They went on to provide the topics that would shape and define Vatican II. In light of this influence, it is not unusual or presumptuous to assume that theres a connection between the Church and the Hutu movement in Rwanda. The social justice movement was in the air breathed by Catholic missionaries trained in Europe. Missionaries and educators brought this mentality and teaching with them to Africa where they believed that these ideals could be practically, and in the case of Rwanda, fatally applied. The role of the Church in colonial and post-colonial Rwanda is immensely complex. It is not within the scope of this article to address it in all its complexity. Instead, the emphasis of this analysis is limited to the ideological connections between them. But as the reader will see, this limited scope carries deep implications for our understanding of how this genocide found its way into the Churches in Rwanda.
What emerges from this comparison are several surprising and ironic parallels. Even though these texts are separated by time, culture, language, and geography, there is a relationship between them that has previously been unexplored. A close examination of The Hutu Manifesto of 1959 reveals a significant ideological debt to the encyclicals being examined here. It is unknown whether Kayibanda, the author of the Manifesto, and future first President of postcolonial Rwanda, ever read them. He does not quote them per se, but there are particular indications in the text that he leaned heavily on the central themes within them. He was, after all, steeped in this new body of social teachings through his education and upbringing.
This is an attempt to understand how the ideas of Catholic Social Teachings (CST) were reinterpreted and applied to the Rwandan setting. The problem was not so much with the ideas themselves, as it was with their interpretation in the context of post-colonial Rwandan, far removed from the European theater in which Catholic Social Teachings were born. This study will highlight three examples of this appropriation from The Hutu Manifesto: 1) the papal promotion of private ownership and property espoused in the encyclicals was converted to a final rejection of the practice of Ubuhake in Rwanda. (Ubuhake was a traditional Rwandan form of land usage modified by Belgian administrators to resemble medieval European feudalism). But the papal insistence on private ownership as the antidote to continental socialism was used in Rwanda to support a radical redistribution of lands into Hutu hands after the Belgians left; 2) there is also a strange reflection in The Hutu Manifesto of the papal fear of socialism, manifested in Rwanda through the strange and wildly inaccurate accusation that the Tutsi were communists;
and 3) as in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, the answer to the threat of socialism was to embrace democracy and the common good, except in Rwanda, the common good meant the complete transfer of power from the Tutsi minority to the Hutu majority, led by a small class of Hutu elite. The common good in Rwanda was translated as the Hutu good.
The study then turns to examine the underlying foundation that made these interpretations possible. The Churchs belief in a divine racial hierarchy assumed the superiority of Europeans above Africans. It also asserted the racial superiority of the Tutsi vis-a-vis the Hutu (discussed below). This construct of racial difference, called the Hamitic Hypothesis, had been so thoroughly woven into the fabric of Rwandan society by the Belgians and the Church that when Hutus came to power, they maintained the racial categories so that retribution could be more precisely delivered against the Tutsi people, fueling the anger of the Hutu about past oppression and targeting the Tutsi in the future. So when the papal encyclicals spoke of raising the lower classes, The Hutu Manifesto, interpreted this as a call to lift the stature of the Hutu.
This study illustrates how the Catholic Social Teachings were reassembled in a context completely foreign to its provenance. CST gave a gloss of religious legitimacy to the Hutu cause, and in the early years of the revolution helped to promote an ideology that became toxic and then genocidal. This study concludes that the Churchs blindness to its own tradition of racial superiority and scientific classification made it vulnerable to a massive distortion of its noble
tradition of justice and equity. This lack of self-scrutiny made the Church virtually powerless to oppose the foundational assumptions of the Hutu ideology, which metastasized into genocide.
THE HUTU MANIFESTO
Politics in Rwanda during the 1950s was complex. It is useful to focus on the influence behind perhaps the most powerfully influential Rwandan document of the late 1950s, The Hutu Manifesto of 1957. There are few documents more important to the formation of what would become Hutu ideology than The Hutu Manifesto. Hutu extremists right up until 1994 referenced this document. But what was behind The Hutu Manifesto?
In general, the 1950s saw a shift in the sensibilities of the clergy coming to serve in Rwanda. One missionarys example can serve as a window into the way this European influence made its way into Rwanda. Father Georges-Henri Lvesque came from Quebec to carry out the another Quiet Revolution (Rvolution tranquille) in Rwanda (Fr. Guy Musy)2. Influenced by the political
Father Levesque took advantage of its valuable network of international relations to embark on this adventure. First, he surrounded himself with young Canadian brothers who became the first officers of the University: Vice-rector, deans, general secretary, teachers, chaplain, librarian, etc. This team enlisted four Swiss Dominicans who been trying since the late '50s to establish itself at the heart of a neighborhood - today we would call a slum or favela - in the city of Bukavu , on the shores of Lake Kivu, in the neighboring Congo. The troubles that followed the independence of this huge Belgian colony had made life insecure for these Swiss nationals. So they fell back to Rwanda. From that time and for several after, the Swiss and Canadian Dominicans joined forces to plant the Church in Rwanda and the Order of Preachers.
turmoil in Quebec surrounding the social democratic movement, he arrived with some wariness regarding the ruling elite nationalists, the Tutsis in the late 1950s. Levesque founded the University of Rwanda and was its first President. He was no small influence in Rwandan society. But he transplanted European socio-religious tensions from Canada onto Rwandan soil (Gauvreau, 2005).
Out of this soil came the embodiment of this Catholic ethos in the person of Gregoire Kayibanda, the chief author of the manifesto, who would become Rwandas first President. Kayibanda came from a Catholic family, was trained in a Catholic seminary and later become editor of Kinyamateka, a Catholic newspaper with a focus on social justice issues in Rwanda. In the early 1950s Kayibanda was also the personal assistant to Monsignor Perraudin. As the movement pushed into the late 1950s, Perraudin become increasingly suspicious of the Tutsi ruling elite (see discussion below on communism), but in his early years, during the time when Kayibanda was his personal assistant, his main concern was social justice for the oppressed Hutu. Kayibanda started the new Rwanda Cooperative Movement in 1952 and the Hutu Social Movement in 1957. After the publication of The Hutu Manifesto in that same year, the Catholic White Fathers sent Kayibanda to Belgium to take a journalism course. They obviously saw him as the Rwandan voice for this fledgling movement that grew out of the principles of CST. This body of teachings was woven into the education and ethos of Rwandan seminaries and clergy. Granted, liberation was spreading all across Africa after World War II, but Rwandas special relationship with the Catholic Church gave priests and clergy a uniquely influential role in the politics of the country. Even if we only had these historical factors it would be reasonable to
assume that Kayibanda was fairly close to these papal encyclicals. And in fact, there are some striking parallels that strengthen the connection. Admittedly, it is easy to be facile and simplistic when attempting to show the literary influence on a particular idea or movement. But there are compelling reasons to read The Hutu Manifesto3 in light of two extremely influential documents in the Catholic social justice tradition: Leo XIIIs Rerum Novarum (1891) and later Pius XIs Qudragesimo Anno (1931).
OWNERSHIP AND UBUHAKE
In Rwanda, land use was a lightening rod issue that touched nearly every Rwandan. The Belgian instituted system of land use is referred to in The Hutu Manifesto as ubuhake (Lenski, 1966). In the opening paragraph it traces the origin of this practice back to the pre-colonial period. The fear, the inferiority complex, and the atavistic need of a guardian, attributed to the essence of Hutu, if found to be a true reality, are the legacy of a feudal system (Kayibanda, 1957). The reference to a feudal system is another example of how thoroughly colonialists had reshaped Rwanda into European historical models. The use of the land in pre-colonial Rwanda was anything but uniform (Linden and Linden 1977:10-28). Rwanda resembled feudalism only to someone who did not wish to understand the complexities of the social structure of this region,
At present there is not a published English translation from the French. The author is indebted to Naimh Cloughley for her work on this translation. It is a difficult document to translate. It is little wonder that Kayibanda was sent to Belgium to take a writing course after the Manifesto was published.
which did not follow colonial political boundaries. In modern Europe, feudalism was a pejorative term used to refer to any land-based economic system that was not sufficiently modern or capitalistic.
Regardless of the system of Tutsi kingship, kinship, and clientage that had evolved in this region since the mid 18th century, Kayibanda and the architects of Hutu ideology were convinced that In half of Rwanda - the most Hamitic [Tutsi] areas - the land is hardly real property to its occupant. This precarious occupation does little to encourage work. Because of this, people who have nothing but their own hands to support themselves are at a disadvantage. By ignoring this system of chores (ubuhake), which is the monopoly of the Hutu, the Tutsi have every advantage to improve his household (Kayibanda 1957).
This system, referred to as chores, was believed to be systemically unfair. The idea of private ownership by private citizens not linked by kin, clan, or king was virtually unknown in Rwanda, but this is the first demand of The Hutu Manifesto: The legal recognition of individual land ownership is understood in the Western sense of the word, each having an area sufficient for crops and livestock. The practice of grazing by the bourgeoisie would be eradicated at least in the way that customs now fit and protect them. For this law, there would need to be competent services to determine what land would suffice for a family of 6 to 8 children being given the productive possibilities of the Rwanda-Urundi soil. All those who are actually in the area at that time would be registered by the deputy-leader as the real landowners in the Western sense; and the rest would be registered little by little, helped by the displacement movement which is beginning in certain regions of the country Kayibanda 1957).
This Western perspective on ownership may not have been developed by the church, but it is certainly one of the central tenets of CST articulated by Rerum Novarum. A longer quote is necessary to catch the utopian vision that private ownership promises. We have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners. Many excellent results will follow from this; and, first of all, property will certainly become more equitably divided. For, the result of civil change and revolution has been to divide cities into two classes separated by a wide chasm. On the one side there is the party, which holds power because it holds wealth; which has in its grasp the whole of labor and trade; which manipulates for its own benefit and its own purposes all the sources of supply, and which is not without influence even in the administration of the commonwealth. On the other side there is the needy and powerless multitude, sick and sore in spirit and ever ready for disturbance. If working people can be encouraged to look forward to obtaining a share in the land, the consequence will be that the gulf between vast wealth and sheer poverty will be bridged over, and the respective classes will be brought nearer to one another (Pius XIII, 1896).
It is easy to see how The Hutu Manifesto co-opted this vision from the social justice movement and applied it to Rwanda. The idea of private ownership was not simply an endorsement of a cultural shift, it was the divine order. Pius XI makes it clear: The same feeling those many Catholics, both priests and laymen, shared, whom a truly wonderful charity had long spurred on to relieve the unmerited poverty of the non-owning workers, could in no way convince themselves that so enormous and unjust an inequality in the distribution of this world's goods truly conforms to the designs of the all-wise Creator (Pius XI, 1936).
TUTSI COMMUNISTS
Socialist ideologies were also on the rise in the early 20th century, and this political and social movement had negative implications for the larger church. The Vaticans emphasis on private ownership was in response to the growth of secular labor unions in industrialized countries, especially France. Rerum Novarum took a firm, some would say radical, stance against any socialist agenda. The idea of state-owned property and the equal distribution of wealth had become Europes bugaboo. This fear of socialism also took hold in Rwanda. The Tutsi elite had become so closely associated with the government that people identified Tutsi ownership as socialism. The fear of socialism, which was so closely tied to atheism, extended to Rwandan society as a whole. What developed is the wildly inaccurate accusation that the Tutsi were communists.
Atheistic socialism was seen as enemy number one by the Church and was firmly associated with the social justice movement. The fact that this charge did not remotely fit with the goals of the Tutsi elite (who appear to have been more free market capitalists than anything) lends credence to the idea that the movement was deeply influenced by Western fears about socialism. It was part of the package of CST at that time. The concept of private ownership was deemed an antidote to the socialistic (and therefore atheistic) danger of state-owned capital. Indeed, private ownership is in accordance with the laws of nature(Pius XIII, 1896, p. 8).
This was not an easy idea to sell. In Europe, it opened the Church up to the accusation that it actually favored the rich, who already owned most of the property. To call private ownership
natural could be an endorsement of the practices of the rich. Pius tried to sail between the rocks of individualism and collectivism (Piux X1 1936:46). He echoes the Rerum Novarums defense of the right of property against the tenets of the Socialists of his time by showing that the abolition [of private ownership] would result, not to the advantage of the working class, but to their extreme harm (Pius X1 1936:45). The renunciation of Socialist tenets also played into Rwandan politics and created a specter of fear that eventually dissolved any middle ground of compromise.
The year 1959 was a tumultuous and violent one in Rwanda. In many ways it was the turning point that set the stage for the 1994 genocide. One can track the political shifts in months and days. Lines were being drawn and the ground of moderation and temperance was fast disappearing. The Church had been split between those who favored staying with the Tutsi elite (the power) and those who favored the Hutu (the oppressed). The writing was on the wall for the Belgians. All but a few Rwandans wanted them to leave. The question was who would hold the reins of power -- the established Tutsi ruling class or the Hutu elite, with its larger popular majority? It is not surprising where CST came down on this issue. Rwanda had begun to fracture into opposing sides. Because the Tutsi had been so closely associated with the Belgians, they worked very hard to separate themselves from their colonial associations, and in so doing, they tended to sound more nationalistic. The Tutsi monarchists group UNAR (Union Nationale Rwandaise, founded in 1959), spoke of a Rwanda that was to be free of any Western influence, including the Church. UNAR sought to establish Rwanda as an autonomous African country. The problem was that the Tutsi elite had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo,
they were opposed to broad sweeping democratic reforms because the Hutu majority seemed to be waiting in the wings to gain political, social, and literal ground. This, of course, incensed Hutu groups, such as PARMAHUTU and APROSOMA and civil war erupted late in 1959.
The White Father Monsignor Andr Perraudin, Kayibandas close friend and advisor, had consistently called for unity and calm.4 But by 1959, he was irrevocably associated with PARMAHUTU because of his close work with Gregoire Kayibanda and his use of Catholic Social Teachings, which included the fear of communism. This fear of communism led Perraudin to interpret the rhetoric of the Tutsi elite as Nazi-style socialism. The UNAR party seems to wish to monopolize patriotism on its behalf and to say that those who are not with them are against the country. This tendency strongly resembles the national socialism that other countries have known and which has done them so much harm (Perraudin, 1959).5 This thinly veiled linking of the Tutsi elite of UNAR to the Nazis did not go unnoticed; Monsignor Perraudin came under attack from Tutsi leaders. The Hutu groups then rallied around Perraudin by sending a letter to Pope John Paul XXIII branding the nationalists party as totalitarian and denouncing its fascistic intentions. The letter coincided with a directive from Perraudin, which
Monsignor Perraudin and Bishop Bigirumwami wrote a pastoral letter Nov 6, 1959 speaking about denouncing all violence. Au nom de notre seigneur Jesus Christ dont nous sommes les representants sur terre, nous vous disons qui tout cela n'est pas chetien, nous deplorons et nous le condamnons absolument. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ we are the representatives on earth, we say that all this is not speaker of the Christian, we regret and we condemn [the violence] absolutely. 5. Quoted in Linden, 1977 p. 264
identified the Churchs enemies as communists. He told Hutus that Communism is active. Satan is alive (Perraudin, 1959).6
The abhorrence of communism is not as overt in The Hutu Manifesto, but there is still an effort to distance the Hutu cause from anything even remotely resembling communism. The Hutus regret seeing how they are almost systematically repressed to inferior places. The policies used for this repression misses only a few. Taken together, there is only one step from the cold civil war to xenophobia. This is the reason for the popularity of communist thought. It is also only one step away (Kayibanda, 1957). This vigilance against the taint of socialism, which had been part of the package of CST since Rerum Novarum, had a polarizing effect on the national dialogue. In Rwanda, the charge of socialism, communism, or fascism was less of a diagnostic tool as than a way to rally the Church on behalf of the Hutu cause. For all of Monsignor Perraudins letters calling for peace and non-violence, his extreme phobia about socialism led him and many other clergy to act out of fear -- simplistically, to support the Tutsi-elite equalled being a communist. And because the Vatican had so roundly condemned socialism and the inexorable atheism that followed, support of the Tutsi would have been nothing short of abandoning the Church. The fact that many Tutsi groups already opposed the Church for its close association with the colonizers did not help to bring the groups to a negotiating table. In fact, the Church cleaved even more to the Hutu cause.
Quoted in Linden, 1977 p. 269
Of course, the answer to this socialist problem was democracy, which appealed greatly to the Hutu, who outnumbered Tutsis nearly six to one.
DEMOCRACY, JUSTICE, AND THE COMMON GOOD
Rwandans were at their political ground zero at this stage and there was an increasingly bitter dispute about the role of government in public life. Those priests and nuns who had been influenced by CST would have found what appeared to be very specific teachings on this subject. The public institutions themselves, of peoples, moreover, ought to make all human society conform to the needs of the common good; that is, to the norm of social justice. If this is done, that most important division of social life, namely, economic activity, cannot fail likewise to return to right and sound order (Piux X1 1936:110).
This idea of the common good was interpreted as the Hutu good. Read in the context of the Belgian colonial legacy, the concept of distributive justice described in Rerum Novarum was interpreted as a mandate for a democratic, to wit, Hutu-dominated society. It would be irrational to neglect one portion of the citizens and favor another, and therefore the public administration must duly and solicitously provide for the welfare and the comfort of the working classes; otherwise, that law of justice will be violated which ordains that each man shall have his dueAmong the many and grave duties of rulers who would do their best for the people, the first and chief is to act with strict justice with that justice which is called distributive - toward each and every class alike (Pius X111 1896: 110).
This synthesis of distributive justice, the common good, and the right for private ownership of land came together in The Hutu Manifesto in very practical yet revolutionary ways. One of the barriers identified by Kayibanda was the status quo. The wielding of the sword of custom (umuco wigihugu) by monopolistic interests [Tutsi] is not an effective method in garnering the necessary confidence. Neither does it establish justice and peace in the face of real aspirations of the people (Kayibanda, 1957). What The Hutu Manifesto proposed was nothing less than a complete overhaul of Rwandas centuries-old land use traditions. Kayiubanda seems to be aware of the scale of this proposal. On the subject of land ownership, the measures must not be taken too quickly, despite the Land Councils propositions for the country. Many members of the council might be tempted to view the problem in a unilateral fashion, without taking into account the difficulties or the commoners actual aspirations for this trade (Kayibanda, 1957).
The injustice that occurred under the Belgians was biased and material, and as a consequence, many reasoned that the solution to these issues also had to be equally biased and material. And in fact, most of The Hutu Manifesto is taken up with demands for reforming land allocation, political elections, law making, and education. And this is where the CST tradition of the 1950s was oddly religious in places. Whereas it was very useful in identifying injustice, inequity and the forces behind such, it was less specific about solutions. When it might have made sense to propose detailed political solutions to political problems, the Church tended, at
least at the papal level, to encourage piety over politics, especially when addressing the lower classes. Rerum Novarum lays out its solution for the working class: This, as our Lord teaches, is the mark or character that distinguishes the Christian from the heathen. After all these things do the heathen seek . . . Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His Justice: and all these things shall be added unto you." Let our associations, then, look first and before all things to God; let religious instruction have therein the foremost place, each one being carefully taught what is his duty to God, what he has to believe, what to hope for, and how he is to work out his salvation; and let all be warned and strengthened with special care against wrong principles and false teaching. Let the working man be urged and led to the worship of God, to the earnest practice of religion, and, among other things, to the keeping holy of Sundays and holy days. Let him learn to reverence and love holy Church, the common Mother of us all; and hence to obey the precepts of the Church, and to frequent the sacraments, since they are the means ordained by God for obtaining forgiveness of sin and for leading a holy life (Piux X111 1896:57).
Pius XI gives a stirring call: To ward off such great evils from human society nothing, therefore, is to be left untried; to this end may all our labors turn, to this all our energies, to this our fervent and unremitting prayers to God! For with the assistance of Divine Grace the fate of the human family rests in our hands(Piux X1 1936:145). The language is decidedly religious and apolitical. The solution to these practical social problems is to be a better Catholic. But there are other passages that blur the line between description and prescription. Pius even puts a divine spin on social justice when addressing the landed classes. But not every distribution among human beings of property and wealth is of a character to attain either completely or to a satisfactory degree of perfection the end which God intends By this law of social justice, one class is forbidden to exclude the other from sharing in the benefits To each, therefore, must be given his own share of goods, and the distribution of created goods, which, as every discerning person knows, is laboring today under the gravest evils due to the huge disparity between the few exceedingly rich and the unnumbered property less, must be effectively called back to and brought into conformity with the norms of the common good, that is, social justice (Piux X1 1936: 57-8).
The dark irony of this statement is not lost on anyone who knows how the tables were so radically and violently turned against the Tutsi. CST may have emerged with the best intentions, but it was quickly hijacked and militarized. In Rwanda, the idea of the common good was lost amid the scramble for limited resources. Equity for the poor meant equity for the Hutu and this could only be accomplished by taking from the Tutsi.7 This redistribution could only happen if the new Hutu led government could distinguish Tutsi from Hutu. If the Belgian colonists succeeded at anything, it was to make social class and race indistinguishable in Rwanda.
CLASS AS RACE
When we examine the parallels between CST and The Hutu Manifesto, it is important to remember that by the 1950s race and class had become synonymous to most Rwandans. This was due, in large part, to the European influence of scientific racism and the Hamitic myth that gave it a religious veneer.8 Linden first noted that: the choice of words [in The Hutu
7 In addition, the lack of sufficient freedom for initiative in an absolutist structure, along with the economic inferiority imposed on Bahutu by these social structures, and that they function to systematically hold them subordinate, handicaps each attempt of Hutu to match their peers. The Hutu Manifesto 8 This is a tremendously complex phenomenon that demands more attention than is possible here. The reader is referred to Mahmood Mamdanis Citizen and Subject (Mamdani, 1996). No single author has better identified the process by which European colonial powers maintained a homeostasis of chaos and internal division within their ward colonies. Human taxonomy was a large part of the system that converted social ethn icities into scientific racial classes. As will be seen in the next section, it was the churchs blindness to the power of raceing that undermined any attempt to militate the violence that came with Rwandas shift to Hutu dominance. Certainly some of the intensity of the violence against the Tutsi was due to the Belgian insistence of racial inferiority that Hutus came to internalize and deeply resent. After the Belgians left, the favored Tutsis became the proxy target of Hutu violence. If Hutus had not come to believe in this racial inferiority, the reaction would not have been as
Manifesto], race rather than tribalism, would not have been alien to Hutu leaders. The evidence at my disposal suggests that the Hutu did not see themselves as a tribe in conflict with another tribe but, on the model of European-African relations, as an oppressed race ruled by a minority (Linden and Linden 1977:273). So when Leo XIII spoke of class in Rerum Novarum, it was read as race in Rwanda. Here is a quote that illustrates how context may have shaped interpretation: The richer classes have many ways of shielding themselves, and stand less in need of help from the State; whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon, and must chiefly depend upon the assistance of the State. And it is for this reason that wage-earners, since they mostly belong in the mass of the needy, should be specially cared for and protected by the government (Piux X111 1896).
In the European setting, to which this was addressed, there is no racial distinction attached to the rich and poor. But in the Rwandan setting, the players were well established and the issue of equity would have resonated loudly with anyone sympathetic to what had happened under colonialism. The richer class was without doubt the Tutsi elite. The poor were the majority Hutu who had been restricted and used for labor to cultivate Tutsi land. So when Rerum Novarum demands: that wage-earners, since they mostly belong in the mass of the needy, should be specially cared for and protected by the government, this was seen as an unambiguous mandate to stand up for the masses, who were overwhelmingly Hutu. We can see this concern expressed in The Hutu Manifesto, mutatis mutandis.
violent. But this is only one factor in a much more complex psychological mechanism and should be kept in context.
If we agree that the real Tutsi administration is participating more and more in the countrys government, we must however be wary of any involvement which, while downplaying the white-black colonialism, leaves the Hamitic colonialism, which is worse for the Hutu. We must at least level the difficulties which could stem from the Hamitic monopoly on the other more numerous and older races in the country(Kayibanda, 1957). (Hamitic colonialism discussed and defined below).
This exploitation of one class by another is expressed even more clearly in the early sections of Quadragesimo Anno. For toward the close of the nineteenth century, the new kind of economic life that had arisen and the new developments of industry had gone to the point in most countries that human society was clearly becoming divided more and more into two classes. One class, very small in number, was enjoying almost all the advantages which modern inventions so abundantly provided; the other, embracing the huge multitude of working people, oppressed by wretched poverty, was vainly seeking escape from the straits wherein it stood.
These words would have resonated with those who had been marginalized by the colonial system. It gave religious language to a social problem that was very real in Rwanda. Without knowing it, Pius XI provided a cipher through which Rwandas discontent could be interpreted within a religious framework.
The concept of distributive justice became retributive justice. In the divisive and increasingly violent context of the 1960s and 1970s, the Church completed its shift to the Hutu camp. Because of its colonial preference for the Tutsis under the Belgians, the rise of Hutu liberation made any association with the previous Tutsi leadership dangerous. Along with the Belgians, the Church faced expulsion from Rwanda. This shift was facilitated, even encouraged, by the growing popularity of CST. It provided a way for the Church to survive in the rapidly changing political landscape. But this new allegiance came at a cost. Despite the numerous calls for peace
during the Hutu Revolution, the Churchs previous colonial relationship with the Tutsi elite made it powerless to establish any middle ground of compromise without being open to the charge of being colonial Tutsi sympathizers. In a sense, the principles of CST worked so well in Rwanda that the Church became trapped by its own success. The Hutu movement had been successful in creating the image of a victimized people (Hutu) who now had God on their side in a holy crusade for liberation. And Catholic Social Teachings were used to undergird, legitimize, and empower the movement.
Imagine for a moment that the 1994 genocide had not happened, that genocidal violence never had entered the country. Most likely, Rwanda would still be split along racial lines with a Hutu majority dominating public life. In this alternate universe, the Church would be justified in looking back on those years and claiming a moral and religious victory for the power of CST. Even if there had been violence, which there often is in a revolution, the Church would likely honor the Hutu martyrs that died for their holy cause at the hands of the ruling Tutsi elite. Without the genocide of the Tutsi and the grave violence perpetrated by Hutu extremists, the Church might have remembered these events as the liberation of the Hutu people and the rescue of Rwanda from socialism. But this alternate reality did not happen. Hutu extremism took root. It was able to use and distort the social teaching of the Church and create perhaps the most violently genocidal of ideologies in the 20th century. But if the tenets of Catholic Social Teachings are founded on the gospel, if they are intended to give franchise to the oppressed and lift people from shame to dignity, then what was the weakness that made this message of hope
and humanity vulnerable to distortion? I believe the answer to this question is in the ID cards issued by the Belgians in 1934.
LOOKING BACK AT HAM
Often tattered and bloodstained, the Rwandan ID cards stand as a haunting remnant of the colonial era in Africa. They were first issued in 1934 by the Belgians in Rwanda to identify the Tutsi so that they could buy property, gain acceptance into secondary schools, attend universities and seminaries, or secure posts within the government, which accounted for the vast majority of paid employment. In 1994 they were used as a gruesome winnowers fan for the slaughter of the Tutsi. These cards are a reminder of how an entire society became so consumed by the fear of a Tutsi invasion that the only option seemed to be the complete annihilation of every Tutsi and sympathizing Hutu in Rwanda. They also stand for a Church that was not only powerless to stop the genocide, but that also had a disturbing role in forming the ideology that eventually convinced so many within the Church to participate.
In the decades leading up to the 1959 revolution and before the institutional shift described above, the leadership of the Church was solidly on the side of the colonial agenda, which included the preferential treatment of the Tutsi. To understand this, it is crucial to be aware of the Hamitic Hypothesis. This appears to be the single most influential factor in the Rwandan
genocide, but for different reasons at different times, as will be explained. In one sense, this is a very simple idea that was universally accepted at the time. It was based on the biblical story of Noah and his three sons (Genesis. 9:18-28), one of whom (Ham) was disowned by Noah for seeing him naked when he walked into his tent (Noah had passed out drunk from his own wine). Hams bloodline was subsequently enslaved to Shem and Japheth (with Shem connecting the bloodline to Abraham). Among those Europeans who brought enslaved Africans into the new world, it was assumed that the descendants of Ham were ordained to be the slaves of the chosen people, which by this time was no longer the Jews, but European Christians. This idea was exploited in ante-bellum America to promote the slavery of Africans as a civilizing force for the cursed descendants of Ham (Haynes, 2002). For those Europeans, especially the Belgians, whose business included keeping Africans in the continent to extract its resources for use in Europe, the Hamitic hypothesis took a very different tack. In America, being a descendent of Ham meant a life of slavery; in Rwanda being a descendent of Ham made you the ruling class over the majority Hutu. The Church in Rwanda embraced the Hamitic hypothesis because it fitted almost perfectly with the ideas of 19th century science as well as ideas in the Bible. At a time when science and religion seldom agreed, it was no wonder that the Church embraced one of the few scientific conclusions that did not offend the biblical narrative. The discovery of Africa by Europeans in the late-19th century created a challenge for taxonomists who claimed that they could categorize all life according to this new scientific method. Africans fell into the category of the missing link between apes and humans. The rise of scientific racism is crucial to understanding how science became intertwined with the biblical narrative, or vice versa. But untangling this knot is not as important as appreciating how this went unquestioned in the minds of Europeans. John Hanning Speke was one of the first European explorers to visit Rwanda. His
search for the source of the Nile brought him to places that no European ever reached. Taken from his expedition journal in 1868, we can see the conflation of science and the Bible in perhaps its purest form. In this passage Speke is addressing a Tutsi king: taking a Bible to explain all I fancied I knew about the origin and present condition of the Wahuma [Tutsi] branch of the Ethiopians, beginning with Adam, to show how it was the king had heard by tradition that at one time the people of his race were half white and half black. Then, proceeding with the flood, I pointed out that the Europeans remained white, retaining Japheths blood; while the Arabs are tawny, after Shem, and the Africans black, after Ham. And finally, to show the greatness of the tribe, I read the 14th chapter of 2d Chronicles, in which it is written how Zerah, the Ethiopian, with a host of a thousand, met the Jew Asa with a large army, in the valley of Zephatha, near Mareshah; adding to it again, at a much later date, we find the Ethiopians battling with the Arabs in the Somali country, and the Arabs and Portuguese at Omwita (Mombas) in all of which places they have taken possession of certain tracts of land, and left their sons to people it (Speke 1996: 495-496).
Speke used the Bible as a textbook that explained the historical migration of the Tutsi from Egypt. This idea held an incredible allure and durability. It would have had an intoxicating effect on the ruling Tutsi class; to be so favored by the incoming Europeans who had such advanced technology; to hear that your people are not only mentioned in another foreign tradition, but named as rulers and conquerors. This would have been understandably embraced by Tutsi kings. This European hypothesis was so powerful that it all but supplanted Rwandas own Genesis story of Father Gihana and his three sons Gahutu, Gatutsi, and Gatwa. In this traditional narrative, the peoples of Rwanda are family and the clans which belong to the social order made it possible to define all Rwandans on the basis of about twenty clans, where all categories, Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa, are represented in such a way that Rwandans appear to have reproduced within common kinship groups on the basis of the common ancestor: Gihanga (Semujanga 2003:96). This is not to say that Rwandans did not have an established hierarchy
before the colonialists arrived. Everything we know about pre-colonial Rwandan is based on a social, economic, and political hierarchy that had Tutsis nearly always at the top of the social ladder, except in the Northern regions. What Europeans added to this system was the scientific idea of race. What was once a semi-permeable and flexible hierarchy based on economic and social status became concretized into absolute and immovable racial categories based on science. The inescapability of racial categories can either provide permanent safety and superiority or inescapable bondage; it depended on the categories authors. The Hamitic hypothesis wedded science to religion, with the marriage consummated in Europe and America without scrutiny by scientific or religious thinkers. But the European construct of race implicitly carried with it a judgment of hierarchy that went unchallenged by those who espoused the ideals of CST. This science was espoused by explorers, anthropologists, as well as the priests, nuns, and missionaries of the Church.
When we look back at the role of the church in the years leading up to the revolution, it is apparent that the Church leaders were more pragmatic than ideological, especially when it came to its support of racial distinctions in Rwanda. During the colonial period, the idea that the Tutsi were a special kind of African more closely associated to European lines of dissent made good political sense. Most of the power was already in Tutsi hands. But as the winds of social change began to blow south from Europe, so did the church's allegiance to the Tutsi. As Hutu dominance began to increase in the 1950s, the Hamitic Hypothesis became incompatible with the pragmatism of a Church that sought to maintain its dominance over other Christian groups, especially the Protestants. This was a competition that can be traced to the very roots of
European presence. In this changing environment, political power trumped the Hamitic Hypothesis. This silence, however, should not be interpreted as an alibi for their role in how the Hamitic hypothesis was used by Hutu ideology. In the face of rising violence against the Tutsi during the revolution, the Church did not dare to condemn the reversed racial profiling that was becoming common.
J.J. Carney has recently made a convincing case that the Hamitic construct was not definitive in shaping the Catholic agenda of the 1950s. He concludes that: contextual politics were far more determinative than overarching Hamitic or tribalistic ideologies. (Carney 2012:193). He is correct in pointing out that prominent Catholic leaders were not monolithic in their endorsement of the Hamitic Hypothesis, but this only speaks to the equally disturbing pragmatic shift that took place in the 1950s. This silent and strategic move away from the Hamitic hypothesis, did not mean that it ceased to function in Rwandan culture. It did not. The question is not whether Catholic leaders in Rwanda stopped talking about the Hamitic myth in the 1950s. The question is why they stopped talking about race when they saw the violence and oppression that was being leveraged by this Christian born myth.
When the Hamitic myth of race came into contact with Catholic Social Teachings, a very toxic, volatile substance was formed. Many missionaries and priests in Rwanda may have seen in Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno an opportunity to apply the principles of social justice to a real situation. They saw how they could use these principles to liberate those who had
been oppressed and burdened by generations of colonial rule. In their verve to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth, they did not consider what could happen if it really worked. In most cases, those who fight for the poor or the oppressed are fortunate to see even the smallest success. An establishment that has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo usually tempers the passion for reform. In Rwanda, the Church was ill prepared for the power vacuum that opened in 1959. The next 35 years tell the story of a Church that followed the shift of power under the presumption of Christian justice. They fell into league with Hutu extremists who systematically distorted the teachings of the Church to maintain and increase political power. And the Church, which had once been so influential, not only became powerless to effect substantive structural peace, it became complicit and in some cases active participants in the genocide. Bibliography Carney, J. J. (2012). Beyond Tribalism: The Hutu-Tutsi Question and Catholic Rhetoric in Colonial Rwanda. Journal of Religion in Africa, 42, 172-202. Fr. Guy Musy, o. p. P. d. S. Vicariat du Rwanda et du Burundi, 2012, from http://oprwandaburundi.org/histoire.html Gauvreau, M. (2005). The Catholic origins of Quebec's Quiet Revolution, 1931-1970. Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ Pr. Haynes, S. R. (2002). Noah's curse: the biblical justification of American slavery. New York: Oxford Univ Pr. Kayibanda, G. (1957). The Hutu Manifesto. Lenski, G. E. (1966). Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Linden, I., & Linden, J. (1977). Church and revolution in Rwanda. Manchester: Manchester University Press; Africana Pub. Co. Mamdani, M. (1996). Citizen and Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Perraudin, M. (1959). Mise en garde contra lUNAR Semujanga, J. (2003). Origins of Rwandan Genocide (pp. 1). Speke, J. H. (1996). Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile. Mineola, NY: Dover. Quadragessimo Anno (1936). Rerum Novarum (1896).

Toxic Liberation: The Role of Catholic Social Teaching in The Genocide in Rwanda

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Toxic Liberation: The Role of Catholic Social Teaching in The Genocide in Rwanda

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TOXIC LIBERATION: THE ROLE OF CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHINGS IN THE GENOCIDE IN RWANDA1 TIM HORNER Abstract: This study

THE HUTU MANIFESTO

OWNERSHIP AND UBUHAKE

Quoted in Linden, 1977 p. 269

DEMOCRACY, JUSTICE, AND THE COMMON GOOD

LOOKING BACK AT HAM

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