Antoine Rutayisire's Book on Reconciliation Offers More Than Just the Word of God

Throughout his academic life, Antoine Rutayisire excelled. As a student, he was brilliant and well-behaved, almost always reaching the top of the ranks. He even did quite well in sports as a running athlete. No wonder he made himself a successful career preaching the word of God in an accessible manner and becoming a champion of reconciliation in a country that was shattered by a history of genocide.

In his youth, Rutayisire never dreamed of becoming a politician (or at least that's what he says); his true passion was in the teaching profession. So when he graduated from the National University of Rwanda in the early eighties, he hoped to become an assistant professor there (this was during a time when the university was actively recruiting high-achieving native students to replace expatriate professors). He met the qualifications and got the job. But not long after, perhaps a year later, he was reminded that he was Tutsi and could no longer teach at the national university. He was then sent to teach at a secondary school in a mountainous district in the northern part of the country.

In his memoir, “Reconciliation Is My Lifestyle” (Pembroke St. Press), first published in 2021, Rutayisire offers a vivid account of his upbringing in Eastern Rwanda amidst the ethnic conflicts that led to the genocide and the mass killing of Tutsis in the mid-nineties. He recounts his efforts to assert his right to rejoin the faculty, only to see the depth of the injustice he faced. “I was heartsick with bitter disappointment,” he writes. “If somebody had come around recruiting a rebel army to fight the system in place, I would have been an easy recruit.”

Yet this was only one of many traumatic episodes that marked Rutayisire’s early life. Two decades earlier, his father had vanished without a trace. A dedicated businessman and farmer, Rutayisire’s father often made trips to Uganda on his bicycle to procure goods for his shop in the village. He was ten at the time and had assumed his father was on yet another one of those “import” trips, only to face an unusually prolonged absence. It wasn’t until two years later that he would learn, in a shocking revelation, that his father had met a tragic end. In his writing, Rutayisire tells us he was an emotional young man, who grew up filled with anger and hatred for those who inflicted pain on his life, especially those who had killed his father. He shares this painful memory with the precision of a heart weighed down by sorrow.

Rutayisire is right to believe that the Bible saved his life. Living as a Tutsi in Rwanda before 1994 was a harrowing experience, to say the least. And faith gave him an education and offered solace during the most challenging moments. He studied at a Catholic junior seminary before deciding that priesthood was not his true calling. "I simply felt that being a priest was not my calling," he writes.

Priest or not, Rutayisire’s life afterwards was no less divinely inspired.

His one-hundred-and-forty-page book is also well-written, one must remark. It attempts to be engaging even for non-Christian readers, except perhaps in its last chapter where he adopts a preacher mode. Using easy-to-understand prose, the book explores the depth of his experience, his education, his grief, his belief system in a predominantly Christian nation recovering from genocide, and how this has shaped his worldview. From survivor to preacher in prisons and churches, as well as in other communities, Rutayisire’s voice in Rwanda’s story of reconciliation is hard to ignore. But it also draws from his personal story to contribute to our understanding of what it means to survive genocide and how humanity can make meaning with the tools around it and find purpose in life, even amidst life-threatening conflicts.

With “Reconciliation Is My Lifestyle”, it’s clear Rutayisire wants people to know he’s serious about wanting the world to normalise forgiveness and reconciliation. It’s hard to read his memoir and not be challenged to introspect.

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