You might have read the story of a Russian engineer last week and chuckled to yourself. However, if you found that story amusing, you should worry about the state of your nuts! If you don’t know, which you should, knowing the story of Rwanda, millions upon millions of lives have ever been lost because of a story that began exactly like that.…. But first, the story. Engineer Pyotr Kuznetsov is a soft-spoken, thin, bearded Russian man who, by his looks, wouldn’t hurt a fly. However, as Father Pyotr, he is a self-declared prophet and commands a sizeable following in Russia and Belarus. Last November, he convinced about 40 of his followers to hide in a cave and await doomsday that, he declared, was due this coming May. As luck would have it, when melting snow weighed heavily on one part of the cave and it curved in, 15 of the followers saw that as a message from God to come out. That is how the Russian authorities came to know that doomsday cult members were inhabiting that cave in the village of Nikolskoye, Penza region, about 650 km southeast of Moscow. As I write this, the rest of the cult members are still holed up in that cave. A combined force of Russian police and black-robed Orthodox priests are engaged in a busy but vain game of cajoling and coaxing them out. The faithful are threatening to blow themselves up with fuel canisters, should the police entertain the use of force as an alternative, to get them out. …. The small story, tucked away in the corner of a foreign-news page, jolted me out of my mourning reverie – Rwanda being in a mourning period – due to its uncanny similarity to the story of Rwanda. I remember it as a personal experience in the northern part of this country, and will report it thus, but it must have happened in many a Rwandan Catholic church. It was in 1958/9 when I noticed that the Belgian head-priest of our Kinoni Parish was injecting new prayers and songs in the hymn books. Where we used to pray that we should continue to live harmoniously as equal sisters and brethren, the priest introduced prayers that called for the downfall of those who were favoured on earth, and the rise of those in the place of the disfavoured. “Ibyari hasi bizajya hejuru,” we intoned after the priest, “Kandi umunsi w’imperuka urageze, ibirunga byenda kugwira ba Giti-mu-jisho!” Which, loosely, should translate as: “Whatever is up will go down as it is soon doomsday. The mountains are falling and the ‘you-know-whos’ will perish!” It’s only when I asked my old man as to the meaning of these new hymn songs and prayers that he woke up to the Belgian priest’s insinuations. By that time, however, the populace had been happily chanting away, and when time came to reveal the meaning, everybody concerned had imbibed the prayers and songs as their mantra. You see, the Belgian colonialists had favoured the Batutsi over the Bahutu and Batwa as a tool of administration in their divide-and-rule reign, thus falsely projecting the Batutsi as a superior class, higher than the rest of the other Rwandans. When the Belgian priests explained mythically that the higher class had been cursed and God had turned them into sinful vermin, therefore, it was all very clear and the faithful saw it as a ‘natural’ change of events. The colonial administrators added their ‘revelation’ also, confirming that the Batutsi were the true ‘cursed’ colonialists who needed to be ejected from the desecrated land. The rest, as they say, is history. The history of a people divided into those cursed by God and those charged with the holy task of cleansing the land. The indigenous political elite may have been aware of what was underplay, but there is no doubt that many members of the populace genuinely believed that community standards as defined by God and tradition had been violated. After all, who couldn’t be cursed? Catholic theology holds that Adam and Eve were cursed by God for disobedience, which means that all of humanity is cursed with Original Sin. And, in order to redeem humanity, Jesus takes this curse on himself. It was thus that many Rwandans who set upon their fellow Rwandans and torched houses and killed and maimed, in 1959, thought that they too were acting in the name of God. And, indeed, this held true for the génocidaires until the culmination of the Rwandan genocide, in 1994. If some génocidaires were not so debased (an impossibility) as to think like this, at least they derived moral boost from it so as to freely savour their beastly indulgence. Certainly, no one doubts the fact that Christianity helped colonialism in dismembering African nations. And the dismembered nations are many. You remember the late Kenyan president, Jomo Kenyatta, who one time lamented thus: “When the missionaries came, they had the bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the bible, and they had the land.” Kenya is dogged by the land question, among other problems, to-date. Colonialism has died, but ‘southern’ Christianity (African, Latin American, Southeast Asian) is growing by leaps and bounds. That is why it needs to be exorcised of its curse. Contact: ingina2@yahoo.co.uk
