Conger

The Primate of Rwanda, Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini has called for the reform of the East African nation’s state education system to combat “genocide ideology.”

In his Christmas sermon delivered at St Etienne’s Cathedral in Biryogo, Archbishop Kolini said the state education system was not doing enough to eradicate the racist and tribal ideologies that lay behind the 1994 genocide.

Teachers “have to be taught not to shy away from speaking the dangerous effects of this ideology,” he said.

Organizers of the 1994 Rwandan genocide that left almost a million dead in the small East African nation used the media and state schools to install genocide ideology into the Hutu majority of the population.

This ideology taught that Tutsi were foreign to Rwanda and had usurped the rights of the Hutu. The Tutsi were said to be responsible for the continuing poverty of most of the Hutu people and that they posed a physical threat to the lives and property of Hutus. Hutu ideologues taught the Tutsi were poised to unleash a reign of terror upon the Hutus, and that the slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus was an act of self-defense.

Archbishop Kolini called upon all Rwandans to repudiate genocide ideology and its call to violence and racial hatred. Security and salvation came not through force of arms, he said, but through faith in Jesus Christ.

At the Nov 27 meeting of the Rwandan General Synod at St. Etienne’s Cathedral, Archbishop Kolini was reelected to a further three year term as primate. In his presidential address to the synod he endorsed a package of structural reforms to streamline the administration of the church, and also lauded the solid gains made by the nation and the church in the wake of the 1994 genocide.

Delegates voted to broaden the curriculum of the church’s theological college in Kabunga, and offer degrees in secular subjects—moving it to university status. Plans to construct a metropolitan cathedral for the province in Kigali were also unveiled.

Synod also voted to change the name of the Church from L’Eglise Episcopal au Rwanda to L’Eglise Anglican au Rwanda, (Anglican Church of Rwanda).

Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper.