Rwanda is struggling to emerge from the ashes of genocide. In 1994, the Hutus rose up and slaughtered about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Rwandans were pummeled with hate radio saying the “cockroaches” must die. And die they did. Wives, mothers, children, neighbors, classmates and fellow church members were killed with machete, nail-studded club and gun. They were torched, tossed in rivers and lakes or simply left in heaps where they fell. Some spent days buried under the corpses of family and friends or were raped repeatedly by genocidaires determined to destroy bloodlines.

Rwandan Caregiver. Image - © Lisa Conaway. All rights reserved.

During the last year, I walked the streets of Kigali. I met with women who were deliberately infected with AIDS. I talked with those whose heads were scarred by machetes. I heard from women who were prostitutes because, having lost their entire families at the age of ten or twelve and needing food, they had no other recourse. The shadow of the genocide is very long.

Spiritual belief in today’s Rwanda is of course deeply scarred. As one young woman said, “Everyone in Rwanda believes God keeps changing. People who were talking about faith turned and were involved in the genocide. How am I to know who God is?” Another caregiver said, “When the leaders fall down it is hard to think that the followers will be able to stand up.”

One of the most sobering and grievous realizations of my readings and experience there has been discovering the church’s complicity in the genocide. How is it that those who claim to follow the Crucified One can take up machetes against neighbors and friends or turn others over to those who carry them? How can a church have an open bible on its altar and yet be filled with the skeletons of those who died in the place they hoped would serve as a sanctuary for them?

I asked one man, “Did the leaders of churches not know this was wrong?” He told me that the majority of pastors he works with are illiterate. I thought of Hosea 4:6, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” And then I thought of us, sitting in the pews and standing in the pulpits of America. Are there ways in which the house of God here has so imported the surrounding culture that death is within its walls? We Americans are not being fed a diet of hatred. We do live surrounded by the gods of information, success, comfort and pleasure. One of the things I know from the history of Israel and from Rwanda is that the people of God import other gods in small increments and do not notice that they are beginning to die.

Rwandan mother with fruit. Image - © Lisa Conaway. All rights reserved.

You do not go from worship of a holy God to sacrificing children to Molech in a day or a week. You do not go from dinner with a neighbor to genocide quickly. You get there little by little: blind, numb and not noticing until eventually the horrific seems normal and acceptable. The Rwandan churches became cemeteries not because evil came inside the door, but rather because it came in by way of the infected hearts of human beings – hearts that are supposed to be the sanctuary of God. How is that neighbors and church members could kill so viciously and so intimately? The answer is terribly complex. Such an atrocity has many springs that feed into it. There is the historical, systemic stream and its many aspects. There is also the depravity of individual hearts. Here is part of the story.

On the continent of Africa, European powers arbitrarily put tribes together and called them a country. They then segmented these ethnic groups to their own advantage. It is the old “divide and conquer” principle.  If groups are divided, the whole is weakened and more easily controlled. Energy is directed toward fighting one another rather than the ruling power. The Germans and then the Belgians set the Tutsis up to rule over the Hutus and declared them superior.

A second historical stream was the eugenics movement in Europe in the early 1900s. This is the same movement that eventually fed the Nazi holocaust. Race became a matter of study and so-called scientists came to Rwanda to study the differences between Hutu and Tutsi. The Tutsis were deemed superior due to greater skull size, height and lighter skin, i.e., they were more like Europeans. Though they comprised only 15% of the population, they were given ruling power in government, education and the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1931 race identity cards were mandated and decisions were made based on race.  Racial identity became the engine driving the conflicts. The identification cards reinforced group consciousness in the Hutus, which led to increased hatred, mistrust and division. Eventually the Belgians re-distributed the wealth and Hutus gained power. Many Tutsis were exiled or were excluded from power. As instability and conflict increased, the leader of the Hutu political party was assassinated and in 1959 genocide resulted in 20,000 to 100,000 Tutsi deaths. Over the next decades violence against Tutsis increased. The long simmering division and resentment began to explode. Hutus could murder Tutsis and not be prosecuted. Quotas were developed that limited Tutsi presence in schools and civil service to 10% of the available slots.

A home in Rwanda. Image - © Lisa Conaway. All rights reserved.

The mass media were a third stream contributing to the turmoil. Radio relentlessly hammered the label “Cockroach” and its accompanying conclusions into the minds of the Hutu people. These messages were powerful and unceasing during the actual 1994 genocide. Tutsis were forced to resign from medical and educational positions. There were attacks on mixed marriages. More and more fled the country.

The fourth stream was the church. Power in Rwanda had become Hutu and Catholic. The church was intimately intertwined with Hutu power and had therefore lost its prophetic voice. Add to these streams others such as grinding poverty or inept and corrupt government, and you can begin to see the historical and cultural forces coming together to form a raging, frenzied movement that resulted in genocide.

There is also a personal, internal component to this catastrophe, which the gospel illuminates. Scripture diagnoses the heart as an internal torrent, full of corruption, deceit and a belief in its own superiority and “rightness.” The torrent rushes out to meet the external river described above and is swept along with thousands of others convinced that an atrocity is for the greater good. The heart “is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick” (Jeremiah 17:9). That means it is fertile ground for all these forces to take root. But how does one’s heart go that far astray?

Rwandan woman carrying supplies. Image - © Lisa Conaway. All rights reserved.

One of the meanings of the Hebrew word for deceitful is “foot-tracked.” This idea pertains to detectable evidence of a visible track of a substance. Hunters find detectable evidence of a visible track in the rubbings of a buck in the woods or in an animal’s footprints and droppings. If we look carefully, we will see that over time the deception of a heart leaves “droppings.”

A heart does not become genocidal overnight. It does, however, leave evidence of its trail.  Matthew 24:12 says, “Because lawlessness is increased (or, because iniquity abounds), the love of many will grow cold.” Genocide begins as I begin to feel more at home in doing a mean or heartless thing to a fellow human. Genocide begins when I malign my brother more easily today than yesterday. Genocide, rape and the deliberate infecting with AIDS begin when I travel the crooked way more freely. “Sin takes away the taste for what is good and the power to loathe what is evil,” George Adam Smith wrote. The person is deluded into thinking that they may reassert themselves at will and put the wrongdoing beneath their feet. Such things are the detectable evidence of a visible track of sin. They can result in genocide. Do we see that when sin abounds in our hearts as individuals and as a corporate body that we end up killing (perhaps slowly or perhaps quickly) others and ourselves?

A Hill in Kigali, Rwanda. Image - © Lisa Conaway. All rights reserved.

Rwanda, that beautiful land of a thousand hills struggles to bring beauty out of ashes. She has much work yet to do. Since the genocide Rwanda is about 70% female, many of them widows and HIV positive. There are hundreds of thousands of orphans due to the genocide and AIDS. Orphaned children go to school with classmates whose parents killed their parents. I pray that the “little” deaths will never again become comfortable and so lead the people to bigger deaths.

The greatest trauma in this world is sin. It is sin that brings forth genocide and death. May the house of God and his people be full of the life of God because we live in loving obedience to him rather than in mindless enslavement to the systems of this world and to ourselves.

Diane Langberg is a practicing psychologist, speaker and author. She is Director of Diane Langberg & Associates in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. During the last year, she has been working with genocide survivors in Rwanda.

On November 7, the GCP held a Foray about Lessons from a Genocide. Click here to learn more.