Listening to Ordinary Rwandans searching for a new theology after genocide

Abstract

The following article is based on a lecture that I gave at the “Reinventing Theology in Post-Genocide Rwanda: Challenges and Hopes” conference that took place at Centre Christus, Kigali in June 2019. It was supposed to be published in the conference proceedings; however, the Editorial Board asked for substantial changes which I could not accept. Those changes related mainly to three points: my way of portraying the Twa, my statement on “others” who “have lost family members in killings and human violations that occurred in the aftermath of the genocide” and had “no public space for mourning”, and my position that post-genocide theology should stand up to any form of human rights violations and to a one-sided identity policy. As a consequence, the Board refused to publish my contribution.

That is why I decided to publish the article in the open access online journal theologie.geschichte. To engage in transparent scientific discussion, I opted for open peer review.