“[A] story marked by heart-rending betrayals, including that of my parish priest.” This is how Fr. Marcel Uwineza has described his experience of the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda 30 years ago. 

Shockingly, this betrayal was more a norm than an exception: Most of the nearly one million people killed during the 100 days of the 1994 genocide were killed in churches or on church grounds – places people believed they would be safe. This makes Fr. Marcel’s decision to become a priest a few short years later even more remarkable. 

On Monday, November 25, 2024, I spoke with Fr. Marcel, a Jesuit who has worked with JRS in Haiti and adjacent to JRS on several other occasions. He called in from Nairobi, where he now leads Hekima University College, and I dialed in from Washington, most notable in this story for what the government failed to do.  

“During World War II, much of the full horror of the Holocaust was known after the fact. But in Rwanda, we knew before, during, and after,” said Ted Dagne, a former Africa specialist at the Congressional Research Service. “We knew, but we didn’t want to respond.” 

Nor did anyone else. A United Nations peacekeeping force was stationed in Rwanda beginning in October 1993, but once the slaughter began, the UN withdrew. When it ended, one in every eight people was dead, including Fr. Marcel’s grandparents, uncles, aunties, cousins, and others, killed in some of the most inhumane ways imaginable: hacked to death with machetes, or in the case of his sister and brother, drowned in a pit latrine. 

One million people killed in 100 days is an astonishing number anywhere. In a country the size of Rwanda, it was a change so profound and destabilizing that recovery, for individuals and country, was nothing short of miraculous.  

In speaking to Fr. Marcel, I wanted to understand not only his personal experience of shock, grief, forgiveness, and rebirth, but also his perspective on learning from what happened. How, just 50 years after the Holocaust, did we again see toxic ethnocentrism create blindness to shared humanity – with so many alive to remember both? Can we stop it from happening again? 

First, some history:  

The division of the Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda was, in a chilling way, a real-life version of the “blue eyes/brown eyes” experiment. The Hutu and Tutsi spoke the same language, were both Christian, lived side by side, and regularly intermarried. Prior to World War I, clear distinction between the groups did not exist.  

When Belgium gained control of Rwanda (formerly a German colony) in 1918, administrators decided based on a then-vogue science called anthropometry that the Tutsis’ “facial traits showed they were of Hamitic or Nilotic origin and were descended from a cattle-herding people who had come to central Africa in search of pasture.” They made the Tutsis, always a minority, their protégés. Only Tutsi children could access the education that would allow them to become future government employees. Hutus were forced into labor; Tutsis were the enforcers. 

 Fast-forward through a lot of global change and political realignment to Rwanda’s independence. An uprising was directed not at the former colonizers, but at Tutsi notables. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsis fled to surrounding countries. Hutus took control of the government. For the next dozen years, there was sporadic violence between the ruling Hutus and Tutsi refugees who had formed fighting units in neighboring countries – then relative quiet until 1990.  

In October of that year, the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), made up primarily of Tutsi refugees, invaded from Uganda. Hutu government officials accused ordinary Tutsi citizens of being accomplices. Between 1990 and 1993, government officials directed hundreds of Tutsi arrests and murders. Eventually a ceasefire led to negotiations and a power-sharing agreement including the RPF, which enraged and once again spurred to violence Hutu extremists.  

Foreign governments encouraged dialogue and denounced human rights violations, assassinations, and localized ethnic violence. None believed that ordinary people – not the extremists but those who had lived together for decades as neighbors and classmates and in-laws – would become caught up in genocidal violence leading to some 800,000 Tutsi murders as well as tens of thousands of Hutu deaths. But the signs were there, like the regular broadcasting of grotesque calls to violence against Tutsis on talk radio and TV. 

Following is a transcript of my interview with Fr. Marcel, edited in places for clarity and length. 

 BC: To start, when and where were you born?  

MU: I was born in central Rwanda, in a city called Ruhango. I was born the 29th of November 1980. Just a few days after JRS was founded.   

BC: Will you tell me about your memories of growing up in Rwanda prior to the events of 30 years ago? 

MU: I grew up in a more or less middle-class family, a very Christian family – my mom and dad were very devout Christians. Prayer at home was not optional. I look back: We knelt down, we prayed.  

My parents wanted me to be best in class, to do the best I can. My dad would come home and ask if I had done my homework and how I performed. He was not pleased if I went out to play instead. I grew up performing very well in school, always first in my class, except maybe when I was in grade five – and my parents were not pleased!  

My family was very serene… I never saw my parents shouting at each other. My mom was very loving, soft-spoken, a primary school teacher. My dad was a businessman. I grew up in that environment, with loving parents.  

When I was about to receive my First Communion, my father asked what I was going to ask the Lord, and I was a very naughty boy, and I said “Dad, that’s between me and God”! But his question was very provocative. When the day came, I received the Eucharist and I said “Jesus, make me a priest one day.” Twenty-four years later I was ordained – so be careful what you ask for!  

 I didn’t know what I was asking, but in time you realize: God actually answers our prayers.  

BC: Thinking back, what do you remember as the signs that things could get really bad? Did you expect that someone would intervene?  

MU: I saw an environment that was becoming toxic because of ethnicity. Some teachers would ask the Tutsis to raise their hands so they would know how many there were in class. I didn’t understand this was a form of segregation, so the other students would know who were the Tutsis in class. Then it became clearer when we had a celebration at home and invited a lot of distinguished people, and one man… said, “Your son is intelligent but the way things are in this country, he’ll never go anywhere.” My father kicked him out.  

My dad was killed in 1992, so life changed. He was in Kigali, downtown, at the central park. He had gone to work with his younger brother, and someone thew a bomb into the park. He was the only one who died. I grew up as a happy boy, but then all of the sudden, life changed. I lost my adolescence.  

Then two years later, the genocide began. It was just difficult to imagine that our neighbors would destroy our property, chase us, kill us… It was hard to take. But also I was imagining that people would not let a whole group die without intervening. But that didn’t happen.  

We were left to our own. You can learn more about this in my book Risen from the Ashes. More than 40 people in our family were killed.  

I was filled with so much anger and hatred. I decided even to never go back to church. But then… my uncle, my godfather Charles Muvara, the brother to my father, the person my father was going to see when he died, he managed to survive in Burundi and came back and took care of us. He was a very devout Catholic, and when we came back for holidays, he would give us money – but on one condition: We had to go to mass. I said, “How will he know if we have not gone to church?” Then he asked me what the readings were, and of course I didn’t know. He said, “If you take my money, you do as I say.”  

 So that’s how I met the Jesuits. It was a Jesuit parish there. They were very humble, and they didn’t look clerical – and so I thought, “Hmm, in the past, I wanted to be a priest. Perhaps I should stay here.”  

So, after college I joined the Jesuits. God can even turn our anger into a message.   

BC: You had family killed and later came face to face with their killer. Tell me about that experience.   

MU: When I finished formation, I went to the tombs of my parents, and I found [there] the killer of my siblings. He had been released by the government but not by my heart.  

He said he confessed, acknowledged the crimes he had committed, and was let go with agreement to do community service as a reparation.    

He knelt down and he looked at me and said “Marcel, do you have some space in your heart to forgive me?” And I didn’t know what to say. Can I? Am I safe? But this is where I realized that to forgive is a miracle. Something invades us. I don’t know what power invaded me; people can call it different names. I call it divine power. I thought he was a monster. But I said, “I forgive you,” and I felt free.  

That has led me to think a lot about the topic of forgiveness. To forgive doesn’t mean to forget; it means to remember the harm, the injury, in a different way. It’s to not be a prisoner of the past. It’s to do the unimaginable. It’s to allow the wronged to begin a new life. It’s lighting a candle in a dark room, to begin to see there is more life. You forego your right to revenge, and it sets you free and builds up the community. The traitor again becomes a human being; the victim is not living in the past.  

And it also made me realize how much I have been forgiven by God. This was an earthquake of my life. It set me on a journey of great joy, of being wounded and a healer, of wanting others to experience forgiveness.  

BC: What have been your experiences or encounters with Jesuit Refugee Service? 

MU: Quite a number of them. My first encounter with JRS was when I was a Jesuit candidate. This was in the northern part of Rwanda, Byumba. There was a refugee camp for Congolese. We had gone to visit some Jesuits working there, and they told us their stories and [about] the suffering and pain of being dislocated, of refugees who had lost relatives and possessions in [the Democratic Republic of] Congo (DRC). This was in 2001.  

Then the second was in Burundi, 2005. The JRS in Burundi – a country that had just come out of several years of civil war and had refugees from [the DRC] – JRS was doing a lot of work in education and accompanying the refugees.   

A word I have come to love: accompaniment. This is what makes JRS not just an NGO. 

Then the third was when I went to Haiti in 2010. I volunteered to go help… soon after the earthquake… There was a lot of pain; people had lost arms or legs trying to run away from the houses that were being demolished by the earthquake. I was there two months, and it was life changing. There is a lot of poverty in Africa, but Haiti is probably the poorest place I have been. [I was] accompanying, listening to people’s stories, giving reasons to hope. 

And I was the liaison for JRS at the UN.  Because there are so many NGOs in Haiti, JRS asked me to be the liaison so they wouldn’t replicate what other NGOs were doing.  

BC: Today, you are a university leader in Nairobi. Tell me about that experience and the students you serve.  

MU: I am the president of a Jesuit institution, Hekima University College, started in 1984. We have programs in theology, peace studies, and international relations. We are soon to start a school of business. It’s a growing institution.  

I have the definition [of leadership] that it is an awesome responsibility to make a difference for others; to make those around us rise. I have been president the last two years, and it’s been a learning moment; you come to realize to be a leader is not just to be in charge, it is to take care of those in our charge. This has been something guiding me and [helping me] offer a vision and invite other people to embrace the vision. Leadership is about making a difference for others. 

Here that means in the last two years we have enrolled in solar energy as [a] university. This has reduced the cost of electricity; we used to pay almost $5,000 per month, and now we are paying less than $400. The investment was huge, but the benefits now outweigh the costs.  

The other impact is the education of the least among us, especially women coming from war-torn areas… I have been able to get 14 fully funded scholarships for women from Nigeria, [the DRC], Rwanda, Cameroon… some from Sudan…. 

We are also revamping academic life with conferences, publications – in two years the faculty have published six books, two of them mine. I am expanding the visibility of the college. It’s not me alone, it’s teamwork, and that’s my great joy…. 

We just acquired a new property and are expanding our campus. That’s another plus. And our students participate in academic and social and sports competitions. If you ask me, the two years have been… There is always room for improvement, but the two years have been grace-filled…. 

BC: Why do you believe that women are particularly important in peace-building processes? 

MU: I have come to realize that I embrace this vision that if you educate one woman in Africa, you educate the whole village. 

Women will not abandon even when men go; they will remain. I saw this in Rwanda. I have seen how women made an impact in the legal sphere after the genocide. Women will work hard especially so girls can have an inheritance from their parents, which was not there before. Women have worked in the courts, the traditional courts, that helped reconcile people…. 

I have an MBA and my research was on women in leadership. My capstone, my dissertation, was on this subject. It’s backed up by literature… When men go, women remain. And they often try to piece together the broken pieces.  

BC: When you return to Rwanda now, what is that like for you?  

MU: Two images come to my mind. And I borrow this from a friend.  

An image of a construction site. This is a country with a lot of rebuilding. This is a country of rebuilding infrastructure, of putting up systems of education and healthcare. Every Rwandan has health insurance. This is a country where, prior to 1994, there was only one national university; now we count more than 20. So access to education certainly helps people to be opened up and see there is more to life, and they cannot be manipulated. This is a country that is clean, and where you can walk morning to morning and feel secure. A lot of remaking and revisioning is happening.  

The other image is one of a cemetery…. Broken people, wounded people. We are still discovering dead bodies killed during the genocide and war… [It’s] a country with lots of memories that need to be healed and purified: memories of survivors and those who are in jail, accused or suspected of committing the crimes. The memories of people who fled… Of mothers who were raped. Of children who are orphans. Of refugees who returned to realize they are the only ones left to tell the story. [But] there is a lot of hope and resilience, and you see the hope and joy in people.  

BC: Based on your experience, do you have any advice for people on how to prevent or stop such crimes as the Rwandan genocide in the future? 

MU: First: Please let us take history seriously. There was a Holocaust of the Jews and 50 years later, Rwanda. Does “never again” mean anything to people? Look at Ukraine. Look at the saga between Israel and Gaza. Look at the two Sudans. Do we at all learn anything from history and other nations? How I wish we took history seriously.  

Second, listen to the victims of history. I often take time to listen to survivors of the Holocaust, and I took time to go to Poland and visit Auschwitz. The victims have a lesson to teach us.   

Third, this whole idea of responsibility to protect other nations when huge violations of human rights are done….  

Fourth, we are now having increasingly populist leaders with a lot of leadership that is not visionary or built on truth and ideals. This is in many places. Political dysfunctionality is in almost every part of the globe… And that really means… [share the] blame because the leaders we choose come from us.  

 If there is a lesson to be learned from Rwanda, it’s resilience… We were completely abandoned. And we had to rebuild ourselves. The past is deep only if we take it seriously. At the same time, the future is filled with so many dreams.  

Finally, leadership matters, and leadership is that awesome responsibility to make those around us rise.   

There is a profound insight by the 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard, which I will use as a concluding thought to this interview. I think it summarizes what I endeavor to communicate to readers: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”   

Toward the end of the The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne (portrayed by Tim Robbins), tells Red (Morgan Freeman), “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”   

The story of Fr. Marcel reveals in a very personal way that hope never dies. We’re so grateful to him for sharing his story. 

Learn more about Hekima University College.