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 may be disappointed at Carney’s limited interest in the social and political impact of the Church, understanding the inner workings of an institution that has played such a crucial role in Rwandan history is essential.

Carney does attempt to answer the important question of how much responsibility the Catholic Church bears for the 1959 uprising that led to the transfer of power from Tutsi to Hutu. He notes that Bishop Perraudin “never called on the Hutu masses to rise up and throw off their Tutsi rulers” (115). Yet incitement to violence is rarely so overt. Research on the 1994 genocide, for example, reveals that organizers used considerable coded language but almost never explicitly called on people to kill Tutsi. Carney goes on to note that “it is more difficult to defend Perraudin against the charges that he further hardened ethnic discourse and helped lay the rhetorical groundwork for the Rwandan revolution” (117). The answer here is somewhat disappointing but understandable, since archival analysis based purely on reading the writings of Perraudin and other Church officials tells us little about how these documents are received and understood by the population. Nevertheless, Carney’s detailed description of what was happening inside the Church in the crucial period from 1958 to 1962 provides an important complement to other works on the revolution, such as René Lemarchand’s Rwanda and Burundi (Praeger, 1970).

Carney presents Rwanda Before the Genocide in part as a challenge to my own work on churches in Rwanda, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda (Cambridge University Press, 2010.) He quite fairly notes that my analysis oversimplifies the complexities of the Catholic Church in the late 1950s, and by devoting more than one hundred pages to something that I cover in less than ten, Carney provides a richer understanding of the Church in this critical period. At the same time, Carney does not sufficiently distinguish his argument from more comparable historical texts, such as Ian Linden’s Church and Revolution in Rwanda (Manchester University Press, 1977) and Justin Kalibwami’s Le Catholicisme et la Société Rwandaise, 1900–62 (Présence Africaine, 1991). These books also analyze the history of the Catholic Church in colonial Rwanda, and since Carney had access to archival materials that were not available to Linden and Kalibwami, clarifying where his analysis differs from theirs would have been enlightening. After all, both Linden and Kalibwami already noted that the Church was deeply divided and insisted that neither Perraudin nor Bigirumwami were as monolithic as their critics portrayed them. Carney does offer new details and new analysis, but it would have been helpful for him to explain where he perceives his argument departs from these previous works.

On the whole, Rwanda Before the Genocide is an important contribution to Rwandan historical studies and particularly to Rwandan Church history. The book is thoroughly researched and well written. Although demonstrating an insider’s knowledge of the Catholic Church, Carney does not hesitate to criticize the institution for its shortcomings. In a helpful epilogue, he considers the ethical lessons of the Rwandan case and calls on the Catholic Church to embrace a more prophetic role that would not compromise political neutrality but would allow the Church to help prevent ethnic and other forms of violence. Detailing the history of the Church in the period just before Rwanda’s first wave of ethnic violence makes clear that Church leaders at that time were not cynically manipulating political events, as subsequent critics have claimed, but rather were unable to unify around an appropriate social stance. The challenge for the Catholic Church moving forward in Rwanda and in other divided countries in Africa will be to determine how to speak with a prophetic voice even as institutional and ideological divisions within the Church persist.