"Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips.
Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and
misery, and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes.” (Romans 3:13-18)
When we flew into Kigali, Rwanda, on August 7, 2008, we had visited three East African nations, and after Rwanda
we would travel to three more. Compared with some of the cities we had already visited, Kigali’s smooth,
newly-paved roads, (relatively) orderly traffic patterns and clean roadsides were impressive.
(Plastic grocery sacks are outlawed in Rwanda, and by law every able adult devotes one day per month to cleaning
the public areas in Rwanda’s cities, towns, villages, or countryside.) Combine this very deliberate national
attention to human infrastructure with Rwanda’s temperate climate and verdant flora, and Rwanda appears,
at first glance, almost Edenic.
We were stopping in Rwanda, however, because this tiny nation in the heart of Africa shares with its larger
neighbors on all sides a growing crisis, a catastrophe that outstrips the best of humanitarian intentions
and the abundance of resources accessible even to the wealthy nations of the West, were such nations inclined
to turn their treasures in Africa’s direction. In 2006 UNICEF estimated that the number of orphans in sub-Sahara
Africa was 48.3 million, and that it would reach 50 million by 2010. (I suspect that this number already may
have been reached and surpassed.)
Most of these children have lost one or both parents due to AIDS, to malaria or yellow fever, or to violence.
Some have extended family to care for them—uncles and aunts, older siblings, grandparents. Some may be taken in
by sympathetic neighbors. But many, too many, will be left alone, to fend for themselves on the streets or in
fields or forests. Many will suffer disease, malnutrition, death. So we spent time in Rwanda (home to about a
million of Africa’s orphans) to bring encouragement to a small group of Jesus’ followers, expatriates and Africans,
who are establishing a tiny haven called a Rafiki Village, where orphans will receive physical, social, educational,
and spiritual care. The Rafiki staff’s prayer and hope is that our sovereign God, who cares for the fatherless
and the widow, will use such means “to turn helpless children in Africa into godly contributors in their
countries” through the power of the gospel, compassionate nurture, and consistent, comprehensive Christian
education. Why, then, have I prefaced this little travelogue reflection with the Apostle Paul’s dire diagnosis
of human depravity, culled with Holy Spirit-inspired insight from a wide spectrum of God’s ancient Scriptures
(Psalms, Proverbs, Isaiah)?
I could tell heartwarming stories, like that of a six-year-old Zambian boy who had supported himself by
breaking rocks into gravel by the side of the road as his mother died of AIDS, but who beamed as he told me
how he loves his kindergarten class and especially the daily Bible lessons. I could share heartwarming
photos and stories of infants, toddlers, and other children who are growing up in cozy cottages, under the
loving care of African widows—some of them, sadly, young widows—who are now the orphans’ adoptive mamas
(so, both orphans and widows are receiving the compassionate support that James 1:27 so strongly commends).
I could mention the grace-grounded, Christ-centered Bible curriculum that is being written to saturate their
hearts and minds daily in the majesty and mercy of God. I returned with such stories to share, stories of
Christ’s grace reaching out to helpless children through grateful believers.
But I also returned pondering Paul’s stark, dark portrayal of the poisonous violence that oozes naturally
from the human heart. A somber morning in the Kigali Memorial Centre exposed me, in a way that I had never
experienced, to the horrific capacity of people like me—yes, they were too much like me
(and you)—first to fear and resent, and then to despise, and then to torture and rape, and then to slaughter,
and then to dismember (or, often, to dismember and then to slaughter) neighbors, friends, strangers, infants,
toddlers, children, elderly women and men, as well as the young and the strong…human beings made in the image
of God.
Surely, when the Rwandan genocide occurred in 1994, I must have been aware at some level that in the space
of one hundred days, from early April into July, about one million people were brutally murdered by the
Interahamwe (trained Hutu death squads), and by others who were coerced by social pressure or incited by
hate radio to kill lifelong friends, school classmates, and previously-beloved teachers.
But how deeply did I—how deeply did most of us in North America—feel the anguish of Rwanda? The United Nations
withdrew its overwhelmed peacekeeping force, rather than augmenting its troops to protect Rwandan civilians,
as the UN commanding officer had pled for. The international community pondered whether the conflict in
Rwanda was anything more than just one more African civil war, and nations that could have helped held back,
reluctant to pay the price of intervention in an unpredictable corner of a still misunderstood continent.
(Writer/Director Rauol Peck opens his 2004 film on the genocide, “Sometimes in April,” with a quote from
Martin Luther King, Jr.: “We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
Rwanda’s “friends” were, indeed, all too silent.) So as the world watched—or perhaps failed to take much
notice—in those fourteen weeks, 85% of the Tutsi minority was ruthlessly eradicated. Survivors, almost a decade
and a half later, still bear deep wounds, physical (visible scars, invisible HIV infection or fullblown AIDS),
emotional and spiritual. The nation itself still seeks healing for its scarred soul.
Was I aware of this? Or did I think that the Rwandan genocide was “old news,” long ago eclipsed
by “new news”—for example, the sumptuous opening exercises of the Beijing Olympics, its colors and
choreography filling the flat screen TV of the restaurant where we dined after our morning in the memorial?
I will spare readers most of the shocking details documented and visibly presented in the exhibits on the
first floor of the Memorial Centre museum: video interviews with survivors who watched, bewildered and
helpless, as mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters were slain before their eyes; interviews with rape victims;
interviews with those who, wounded, hid among the corpses, pretending to be dead themselves, and somehow
survived. I cannot describe the photos of heaps of bloodied bodies on the streets, nor the heart-melting,
happy pictures of little children, beside words describing their favorite toys and pastimes…and stark
descriptions of their violent deaths. Words could not begin to capture the darkened room surrounded by
display cases full of neatly stacked human skulls and bones. I won’t go into the historical analyses of
the origins of the intensity of the Hutu-Tutsi rivalry in Belgium’s colonial policies, deliberate
stratagems to manage a subject people by fostering distrust, envy, and resentment, and France’s
efforts to exploit Rwanda’s independence for its own economic and political ends. No excuses for
the atrocities, no blame-shifting, but a brutally honest portrayal of a depth of evil that
transcended tribal, racial, national, and continental boundaries, concentrated in terrifying
intensity for one explosive moment on one tiny nation in the heart of Africa.
The physical layout of the Memorial Centre silently raises troubling questions for those who come to
learn and remember the 1994 genocide. Exhibits on the first floor narrate, interpret, and illustrate
the genocide’s ominous prelude, its bloody events, and its bitter aftermath. Then, following a
docent’s gentle suggestion, one climbs to the second floor to view genocide in global dimensions
throughout the twentieth century: the Turks’ attempt to eradicate Armenians, the Nazi holocaust
against the Jews of Europe, Serbian humiliation and violence against Croats, the Khmer Rouge’s
killing fields in Cambodia, and other atrocities.
Suddenly the reality dawns: genocide, and the resentment, hatred, and contempt that inflame it, are not a
uniquely Hutu phenomenon, not a uniquely Rwandan phenomenon, not a uniquely African phenomenon. Those one
hundred days—in which neighbor assaulted neighbor, friend betrayed friend, brother slew brother—exposed
the twisted self-protectiveness and calloused indifference that lie hidden in every fallen human heart,
of every race and on every continent. To be sure, from the genocide have also emerged testimonies of
courage and compassion, of Hutus protecting Tutsis at the risk—and sometimes the cost—of their own lives.
Such exceptions demonstrate that the bloodthirst inflamed by hate and fear was not irresistible.
So I return to the questions that entitle this reflection: What does Rwanda need? What does Africa need?
What does America (and the rest of the world) need? A war crimes tribunal headquartered in nearby Tanzania
has sought to bring some of the genocide’s most flagrant criminals to justice. Rwanda is now committed to
resisting class prejudice, tribal conflict, and hate speech through education, not only in schools but
across the fabric of its national life. Wealthy Western nations, perhaps conscience-stricken over their
inaction a decade and a half ago, have poured resources in to rebuild the national infrastructure
(hence the newly-paved roads). These steps are appropriate and necessary, but they cannot get to the root
of the infection, as the Spirit of God diagnoses it through the Apostle Paul: “The venom of asps is under
their lips…. Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery…. There is no fear of
God before their eyes.”
What Rwandans need is what every son of Adam and daughter of Eve on the face of this earth needs. It is what
the Lord promised his ancient people Israel: “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you.
And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit
within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules” (Ezek. 36:26-27). No more a
heart of stone that justifies violence by demeaning fellow humans as “cockroaches.” No more a heart of stone
that masks timidity and inaction behind political doublespeak. That heart-replacement is what Israel in
exile needed, and that is what we and our world need in the 21st century. And that is what God now gives
through the gospel of his Son Jesus, the flawless covenant keeper, the compassionate friend of sinners,
the tortured, murdered and risen Servant of the Lord. He is the Ultimate Friend whose friends ultimately
betrayed and abandoned him. One, in fact, led his torturers to him. “For it is not an enemy who
taunts me—then I could bear it; it is not an adversary who deals insolently with me—then I could hide
from him. But it is you, a man, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend. We used to take sweet
counsel together; within God’s house we walked in the throng” (Ps. 55:12-14).
Jesus, of all people, had the right to cry out to heaven for justice—for vengeance; yet his parched
lips spoke of forgiveness instead. He willingly submitted to the worst that human brutality could
inflict—and, more than that, he willingly bore his divine Father’s just wrath against the very rebel
race that taunted and tore him, the beloved Son. The good news of his sacrifice and his resurrection
from the dead is the means by which God’s Spirit turns stony hearts to tender hearts, transforming foes
into loyal friends: “You are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the
Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (2 Cor. 3:3).
The relative stability and civility of ordinary life in America may lull us into spiritual complacency
and blind us to the potential for cruelty that lies in wait in the hearts of those for whom “there is no
fear of God before their eyes.” Yet America has its own version of hate radio, and racial resentment
and conflict lie not far below the tranquil surface of “business as usual.” Rwanda’s anguish should
awaken us from our blissful dream of predictable life in a safe and pleasant world. It confronts us
with the reality that the gospel in which we find our only hope in life and in death does, in fact,
make all the difference between life and death. This good news of Jesus, God’s Son, the Prince of Peace,
the only Redeemer and Lord, is precisely what Rwanda, Africa, and the whole human family desperately needs.
Dennis E. Johnson
Academic Dean and Professor of Practical Theology
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