On 6 April 1994, when the plane of President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down in Kigali, an attack which triggered the genocide against the Tutsi, I was in South Africa, holding my breath, like all my friends and colleagues, for the upcoming democratic elections, which we hoped would turn the page of apartheid but could be derailed at any moment through political violence. I missed the genocide. Three years later, I experienced first-hand the upheaval that had hit the Great Lakes Region in the 1990s when, after a journey by road from Kigali to Bujumbura, I facilitated a conflict resolution workshop for Hutu and Tutsi Dominicans from Rwanda and Burundi, to whose congregation I also belong. I made three more trips in the area during this period. What I saw and heard then is the seed of the research, initiated fifteen years later, that gave rise to this book.

I rapidly discovered that there are different and sometimes conflicting ways of envisaging the genocide against the Tutsi – and the episodes of mass violence affecting Burundi and Eastern Congo, which will not be discussed here – and that the debate on the memory of the genocide does not spare the churches. In fact, the attitudes of the churches, which were at the same time victims, opponents and participants in the genocide, are among the most contested aspects of that history.

This work with the Dominican brothers from the Great Lake Region brought back memories of my first trip to Rwanda in August 1974, when I spent a few days as a young man in Collège Christ-Roi in Nyanza at the invitation of Canon Eugène Ernotte, a priest from my home diocese of Liège, Belgium, who was a friend of my parents. I remember him proudly citing the names of his former pupils who had become cabinet ministers. He mentioned the massacres of Tutsi that had occurred the year before, but I was too ignorant of Rwandan history to understand what he was saying. Much later, I became uneasy when I found reports – inaccurate as they turned out to be – that Ernotte was one of the authors of the Bahutu Manifesto, the document that prepared the way for the 1959 Rwandan Social Revolution and the anti-Tutsi violence that followed.