Berkley Center

Background: As part of the Education and Social Justice Fellowship Project, undergraduate student Mariam Diefallah interviewed Father Elisee Rutagambwa, S.J., who has served as rector of Saint Ignatius High School in Kigali, Rwanda. In the interview, conducted in June 2016, Father Rutagambwa discusses the role of the Jesuit mission in promoting for education in post-genocide Rwanda.

Can you tell me a bit about yourself and your position?

My name is Father Elisee Rutagambwa; I am the master of Saint Ignatius High School. The school started in 2012, and I joined in 2014. It is a new school, but it is aiming for educational excellence. So far we have had two graduations from lower secondary level, and we will stretch the high school next year, in 2017. We already have two programs, one is Maths, Biology and Chemistry, and the other one has Maths, Economics and Computer Science, so this upcoming year we are supposed to add two more programs of Humanities. The first will include languages Kinyarwanda, English, and French, and the other one will have Geography, History and Economics. So these are the programs the school is providing for its educational holistic approach. The school was funded by Grace Foundation, but it was not the only one. We had some funds from Jesuit communities in Italy as well. We also had small funds from other places, so we move in different direction in terms of funding to provide for and expand the school.

How did you get involved with working at the school?

When I first came to the school I focused on promoting reading in primary school. So I used to bring some of the students to the social center to have sessions of readings to encourage the students to start reading, and to teach them the importance of it and then I became more involved in more activities.

The school is the only Jesuit school in Rwanda, is that right?

Not really, we are the only former school, but there is another vocational Jesuit school in Rwanda. It has been there for five years, and it was built especially for the orphans of the genocide.

On Grace Foundation’s website, they mentioned they are aiming to encourage Saint Ignatius School’s graduates to go to Jesuit universities. What do you think about that?

It is a partnership that we think is important for our students to encourage them to pursue their education in universities abroad, especially because there is a direction that Jesuit institutions should be networking better, to be able to make a global impact and not just to have an impact in one’s country. So I think it is a way to bring more people together to find solutions for their societies.

Is the quality of education at Saint Ignatius School different from other Rwandan schools?

Yes, it is a fact. You can see it from the performance at the school. For instance, when we started, our students scored really well from the start. I think it was the school’s choice to make sure we maintain a good quality, so that we make sure our students will get a good education.

As a private school, how connected is Saint Ignatius to other local schools and the Rwandan society as a whole?

The school is private, but we use the national curriculum. But to achieve our objectives, we add some of the skills we think is necessary for students to know, and that is not included in the regular curriculum. We also have extra curricular activities for the students like clubs. And even though the school is private, we have networks with other schools that are organized within the district. So there are forums between schools, whether they are private or public, so there are interactions in some ways. The schools also offers scholarship to give the chance for students from all backgrounds to apply.

How important is the Jesuit understanding of religion and education for Rwanda?

It is important in itself, not just for Rwanda because if you look at the Jesuits’ social and spiritual understanding, you will see that education is key. If you want to have an impact in a society, you need to teach young people, but for Rwanda, we can have a bigger impact which we do not have right now. We are not yet existing at the level of universities for example, but only at the primary and secondary levels. But the Jesuits had an impact after the genocide and the displacement of many people in Rwanda. What happened came with a lot of destruction in terms of the society, so if you want to build the society, you have to empower the leaders of tomorrow; you have to empower the civil society. You have to have people who will actually make a difference in the society, and for us, we were trying to provide people with trainings to help them be better human beings.

Some people would argue that a major concern about the education in Rwanda is that it is based on memorization. At the same time, and during the conference, many speakers emphasized the importance of critical thinking for reconciliation. In your opinion, where does education in Rwanda stand?

There was a very recent reform in Rwanda calling for a competence-based educational curriculum. It includes many skills, but it also focuses on attitudes, values and practices. So it is not based on simple memorization of different facts, which was a very crucial reform to help our students, especially because education is key for Rwanda. In that way, the education helps students become responsible citizens who can make a change in their societies.

In terms of Jesuit values, how would you define development, social justice, and reconciliation?

In terms of development, we understand that if we want to help our society, we need to use science. This is why the school, for example, invested a lot in laboratories and the IT section, so the students will be ready in very practical ways change their lives and their societies through the skills they gain at school. So development is not simple because it includes a sense of responsibility and honesty and many other values. Although we have not achieved this yet properly, we are trying to achieve these goals.

Regarding reconciliation, as a school we contribute through avoiding any kind of discrimination against students, also through different activities that connects the students with each other, with the teachers and the staff, so there will be a sense of a family within the school, that can also connect it to the community surrounding it. This I think really helps in building the conditions for reconciliation.

Finally, and in terms of social justice, we try to alert our students on some of the situations about the people who have been victims of the genocide for example. We also have regular visits to refugee shelters to help our students develop a sense of social justice. As you know, in Rwanda we have a lot of refugees mostly from Congo and Burundi, so it is important to help these communities. Sometimes we try to gather money, food, and clothes for the refugees. It is not about giving them goods, but about showing our students how they are living, and to let them interact and engage together and to teach them how to see others in humane ways and not just as objects of our charity, but as human beings who have special conditions but still have to be respected and supported.

As a Jesuit priest, what are the main challenges you face in Rwanda?

I think the number is the first challenge. At the school we were only three Jesuit priests. If you have a staff of 60 people, and you represent only three of them, you can understand that you will not be able to make a lot of changes. We are still trying to build our community and our traditions here. Another challenge also is the instability, because I spent two years here but now I am going. My successor will probably stay for one more year and then will be gone, so to stabilize needs more time. What we are doing to compensate this is to train our fellow workers, organizing treats for teachers, for example, so we can actually help those surrounding us. We also organize many activities with the parents to discuss the values we want to teach the students and to discuss some of the problems they go through, which is a way to bridge the gap we have to have a bigger impact. I think it works.

Under colonialism and during the genocide, the church had a very negative influence. Do you think this has affected how people here view religion?

The concept of the church itself needs to be understood in terms of it as an institution that had some gaps regarding its response to the genocide, because the leadership of the church should have stood against what happened, but there was a failure to do that. For many people whose relatives and families were killed in the churches, of course it has been very difficult for them to go and feel comfortable while praying in the church after the genocide. But people evolved, and the church itself has evolved. Now, I think no one can deny that the genocide took place and that some of the killings were in the churches. I also think that as an institution, it is crucial to take responsibility and acknowledge that those crimes happened, in such way so that we make our voice heard that do not accept this kind of behavior. It has been done, but the current stand of the church is that it can do more. They have been working on that, for example there were gacaca trials organized within the churches, which helped with the reconciliation process, and helped people integrate within their communities again.

How did the Jesuits help with that reconciliation process after the genocide?

After the genocide, Jesuits have been trying to bring people together. Many meetings took place where Jesuits and different religious figures tried to talk to the people and figure out what happened to them and listen to their stories. Some of these meetings for example used to happen at Centre Christus and was an initiative of the Jesuits. The Jesuits in Rwanda represent a very small community though, so maybe if our community was bigger, we would have had a bigger impact.

As an educator, do you think there is a difference or a gap between the older and younger generations regarding how they view their past and their future?

Of course the experiences are different, you have got people who lived before and through the genocide and witnessed the injustices of that time, they were discriminated against when it came to employment opportunities and educational chances, also many people had to live in exile. Now, you have the younger generations representing the majority of the Rwandan population, they did not live through that history personally. Of course, even those young generations have their stories as they have their families and relatives who have been affected in some way or another by the genocide. But now the country as a whole is trying to move to the future and not to be confined in the past. This is the current direction that you can see from the government policies and the different activities planned in schools and so on, because if people get stuck in the past, they will get numbed and they will not use their energy in a positive way.

Now, one problem we had was that right after the genocide, it was very difficult to teach a history course, because the existing curriculum at the time was very dividing and discriminatory as it was telling some groups that they do not belong to the country. So it took some time to find new ways to teach the students about the history of the country. It took time because we had to explore different views and even invite different historians from different countries who knew about the history to write a new curriculum. Now, people who lived through that gap of the transformation of history are the ones in my opinion who might have the impression that there are differences between the people living before and the people living after the genocide. But the good thing is the new generation has no bad references to their or other people’s identities, because before even if some people succeeded in all exams, they would still have to face discriminatory quotas, but the new generations do not have that and they have never seen that treatment and they have never experienced the IDs problem, which help them take more advantage of the opportunities they have.

Twenty-two years is a very short period of time, especially when one talks about reconciliation. I understand that the national curriculum changed positively, but do you think the mindsets at homes and among families have changed as well?

From my own experience, my mom never taught me discriminatory things, and as I grew up, I never took it negatively or that I had to submit to that kind of treatment existing at the time. But of course some families who were very and seriously wounded had different experiences. To me, the more negative impact does not come from within but from outside, because different NGOs and international organizations keep seeing Rwanda through the lens of ethnicity even though that the country is now pushing for a national identity to develop the nation and achieve reconciliation. But Rwanda is still seen as an ethnically divided place, but within the country it is different because of the many initiations to educate people. Some people for example come from refugee camps or from the front in the Congo; there is a whole educational program for them that they have to go through. There are also initiatives in the universities where students come together and learn about the history for example. These initiatives’ purpose is to unite people, and also to research and make sure that we are progressing through measuring and seeing the outcomes, and finding the problems that need to be addressed.

So it is not only the school, there are many other educational programs going on in Rwanda. There are also some activities that are being organized through the people directly together, so that they do something common, this way people see that their interests are actually common which makes people more united. For example, some of the women’s organizations have events including both women survivors and women who had relations with the perpetrators. Of course in the beginning there was suspicion, but it has been very helpful eventually.

During the conference, you emphasized the importance of decolonizing the mind. Can you elaborate on that?

First of all, you need to understand the mechanisms of alienating people from their identity. The first thing that was done for that was to tell people they had no history and no past, that all what they have starts from colonization. That way, dividing people is easier as they lack any way of connecting with each other or anyway to resist. The second thing suppress people’s memories of the past, to tell people that they had no heroes, and that their only heroes are the ones they hear about in their history books, who are all Western heroes, which is a lie. So, when you reform the education, of course you have to rediscover the history and explore where you come from, you have to rehabilitate the memory. For example, people who have been living before the colonization should start and become models, the history of the kings and poets and things like that. Decolonization in that sense is important, because without it, our young generations when they grow up will not have any history.

The other thing also is to develop the people’s critical thinking because this is how you decolonize their minds, and not just to swallow anything they get, but to try and put things in their context. The problem is some of our elites think the West is always right and that whatever they do is always good, because this is what they were taught in the so-called international schools. So to me, it is important, and I am speaking about the study of humanities, we have to explore our old resources that have been neglected.

But, from my understanding, one of the challenges of Rwandan history is that it is mostly oral history. Also, there is another challenge of which language to choose: Kinyarwanda or English and French?

You know, there was actually a debate in the 1960s and the 1970s where the Westerners wanted people to think that if they do not have scriptures, they do not have history. We have our old texts that were official, in the transmission of old traditions, the way it was done was very official. In Rwanda, the texts that were used were transmitted from father to son, and the families that used to work with transmitting those scriptures had to make sure they were transmitting it right, without any changes or mistakes. The problem is that that transmission was not kept, so it needs a lot of research to retrieve the facts and not to post random stories. Archaeology, for example, is very important for this. This is why I think it is very important to invest in research so that we constitute facts that can be used.

In that sense, how would you define modernity and its relation to traditions?

We need to understand that neither modernity or tradition is fixed, they are both dynamic. So the concept of development has been ideologized and shaped in such a way so they would be defined in a fixed manner to show that whatever is non-Western cannot be modern, and that humanity has to be going in a fixed linear path to reach modernity and development. This is why when our country try to pose its own solutions for its own problems, many people do not like that, claiming they are not following the international standards. But the international standards are not international in the first place. For us, we should take what works for us, things that work with our resources. Using our own system this way will contribute better to the country’s modernity because it fits its traditions and culture. We are trying to keep standards that would help us achieve the ideal situation for Rwanda.