Rwanda Before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era by J. J. Carney (review)

As a small, land-locked country with few natural resources, Rwanda was little known internationally until the shocking violence of the 1994 genocide attracted global notoriety. Since the genocide, the international community has descended on Rwanda in full force, with numerous U.N. agencies, relief organizations, international nonprofits, foreign investors, and other expatriates focusing on rebuilding the country, supporting development, and promoting reconciliation. The events of 1994 have also attracted scores of journalists and scholars who have contributed to an ever-expanding body of publications on Rwanda. While most of the recent literature has discussed the genocide, or increasingly, postgenocide politics and society, J. J. Carney’s recent book, Rwanda Before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era, is a rare historical work that provides important context for understanding more recent events.

The Catholic Church, whose history Carney analyzes, has played an enormous role in Rwandan society. The focus of the White Father missionary order on converting political elites and developing a close alliance with the monarchy ultimately proved successful. While the chiefs were initially resistant to conversion—in fact, the White Father leadership had to intervene to prevent the Church from becoming a haven for the more receptive lower classes—many of the new generation of chiefs had embraced Catholicism. Ultimately, seeking to solidify the preeminence of Catholicism in the colony, the missionaries worked with Belgian authorities in 1931 to depose the king and install in his place a pro-Catholic son. In the decades that followed, Rwanda’s elite converted en masse, and the general population soon followed. As Carney notes, “By 1950, 647 of Rwanda’s 674 Tutsi chiefs had converted to Catholicism, while nearly all educated Hutu had been trained in Catholic schools and seminaries” (53). By the end of the decade, the Catholic Church stood at the heart of a social uprising that roiled the country.

Although titled Before the Genocide, the heart of Carney’s text actually focuses on a period long before the genocide, the last decade of colonial rule, the period just prior to and after the 1959 revolution that drove the Tutsi chiefs from power and launched Rwanda’s first wave of ethnic violence. (In fact, only one chapter deals with the Church after independence.) Drawing on research in Church archives in Rome and Rwanda, Carney describes a growing tension in the Rwandan Church in the 1950s between the largely Tutsi indigenous clergy and the European missionaries, who came to ally themselves increasingly with Rwanda’s Hutu majority. Carney sees this tension exemplified in the contrast between Rwanda’s first indigenous bishop, Aloys Bigirumwami, named Bishop of Nyundo in 1952, and André Perraudin, a Swiss priest who became Bishop of Kabgayi in 1955. Carney rightly notes that Bishop Bigirumwami is “overlooked in most histories of Rwandan Christianity” (45), and his extensive consideration of Bigirumwami and his importance for Rwandan Church history is an important addition to the literature. In the end, Carney complicates the division between the two bishops, noting that “the caricatures of Bigirumwami as a conservative traditionalist and Perruadin as a Machiavellian revolutionary do not do justice to their ecclesiastical visions. Both supported the political ends of democracy and social justice, rejected violence, opposed clerical involvement in secular politics, and shared a Pauline vision of the Church as a unified Body of Christ” (123).

Carney, who earned his Ph.D. from the Catholic University of America and now teaches in the theology department at Creighton University, demonstrates a deep knowledge of the Catholic Church that many scholars writing on Rwanda lack, yet he manages to write in a manner accessible to a general audience. Rwanda Before the Genocide is unapologetically a work of Church history, and as Carney makes clear, his primary interest is “the Catholic Church’s internal politics” (45). Although some readers...