Reflections on sunday: His Holiness will say ‘it’ to Rwandans also, won’t he?

I was confused when I heard that Pope Benedict XVI met abuse victims on his recent visit to USA, and apologised!Why apologise, as if his priests had done something wrong by ‘abusing’ small boys? In the 1950s, when I was growing up in Rwanda, something similar used to be as common as matrimonial incidents. Only no one could think of calling it ‘abuse’, because to us then ‘abuse’ was something innocent, compared to what the good pontiff meant. In our time, if you wanted to abuse somebody, you oiled your vocal codes. When you were ready, you threw a barrage of verbal insults that ranged from comparing your adversary to a slimy, crawling thing to calling upon the gods above to break his dirty, private organs. If your antagonist was stronger than you, you stood on a hill at a safe distance, and got your fingers ready. Then you raised your voice to its highest pitch and tapped rhythmically at your throat with fingers to produce ‘musical’ insults that haunted your foe for eons to come. Your parents did not use their fingers on their throat (‘gukoronga’) in order to abuse you. If you’d done something wrong, your mother, unlike your father, would heap insults on you. They were not as physically harmful as your father’s walloping, but their effect on your ego was probably more damaging. As for the ‘abuse’ that the pope was talking about in USA, it was taken to be as natural as the nuptial unions that you witness on every Saturday, here in Rwanda. Rwanda was those days not yet blessed with Catholic priests of its own and depended mainly on Europe for its supply of priests. And, like our expatriate consultants today, the European priests were supposed to empower the local, clerical workforce but went about their business very slowly. This, they mercifully intimated to us, was because the African brain worked under solar strain that made it slow. The White priests therefore worked the length and breadth of this country all the time it was a colony and after, which meant from 1900 to the late 1960s. For more than sixty years, they set about converting primitive souls and picking prime swathes of land to erect their churches, while using the faithful to farm the land around the churches, without pay. Meanwhile, we all knew that some of them had small boys as their ‘wives’. Indeed, those days the chosen ‘boy-wives’ considered themselves as a ‘blessed class’, and their parents even took the holy Eucharist in doubles during mass, for having fathered ‘apostles’ to the representative of Saint Peter! Being few, the White priests used to be in charge of many churches. In fact, it was not unusual to find a priest who was in charge of ten churches, so that he was constantly on the move, in the service of his native flock. That is why some of them were so ‘polygamous’ as to have made King Mswati green with envy! Apart from ‘marrying’ a ‘boy-wife’ on every ridge he visited, a priest had many other heavy responsibilities to fulfil. For instance, if there were boys and girls who wanted the sacrament of baptism, he had to train them on how to be responsible. This usually involved sending them to work the land, for cultivation or picking the harvest. Payment was in form of prayer, and Heavenly benefits in the here-after. Rwandans would have borne all this in their usual stoic way without a grumble, but for some priests who tried and succeeded in tearing their social thread (‘injishi’) that bonded them into one, ‘enlightening’ the Rwandans on how different they were. Whereas Rwandans knew themselves as just Banyarwanda, some in the Catholic clergy used the pulpit to re-enforce the inane theory advanced by John Hannington Speke, and applied by the divide-and-rule, colonial administration of the Belgians, that there were three tribes in Rwanda. It is in this way that the prelates participated in dividing the Banyarwanda into Bahutu, Batutsi and Batwa. Unfortunately, the Rwandans, in their pious meekness, never raised a finger in time, much as many of them could clearly see the evil being sown by the colonial and Catholic institutions. Instead, some Banyarwanda swallowed this skewed ideology so much that they concretised it into a genocide ideology whose enduring goal was to cleanse the earth of the Batutsi ‘tribe’. And that is why almost all the Catholics, among the clergy and the flock, failed to claim the moral high ground and, instead, sank into the murky mire of killing and destroying their fellow Rwandans. By the time a few sane Rwandans managed to halt this monstrous machine of death and distress, more than a million innocent souls had perished. With all these abuses, sex abuse fades into a near-insignificance! So, when Pope Benedict talks about “atoning for the great shame”, “enormous pain”, “gravely immoral behaviour” or doing “what you can to foster healing and reconciliation, and to assist those who have been hurt”, it rings most loudly with Rwandans. Their only nagging inner voice: considering the span, scale and size of the destructive evil that befell this country, with the active participation of many Rwandan Catholics, does His Holiness see America as more urgently deserving of his apology? One only hopes that USA does not win the Holy heart so swiftly because of her worryingly waning faith, her ‘majority’ colour, her manner or her means. Whatever the case, Rwanda will remain seized of her faith, and of her patience. Contact: ingina2@yahoo.co.uk