Coffee with Pastor and Author Antoine Rutayisire: "I love being present."

Rutayisire hasn’t read our review of his book, Reconciliation Is My Lifestyle, by the time I meet with him on a Tuesday afternoon at a hotel restaurant in Remera. And I like that because, at least, it means he doesn’t know what I make of his memoir. He has no formed opinion of me. (Critics will know all too well how useful that can be.) When I wrote to him via email a few days earlier, he replied soon after. I told him I had read his book and wanted to meet to talk about it and its central theme of reconciliation. I also mentioned it’s not talked about and I thought it was unfair. He agreed without hesitation. My instinct suggested we meet at Chez Lando hotel. He agreed and proposed 1 p.m. It suited us both.

Pastor Antoine Rutayisire is not only a clergyman. He is an author, a public voice, and increasingly a thinker of what I would call radical reconciliation, a form of forgiveness that insists on moving beyond ritual and into daily life. For decades, he preached and campaigned for unity, including inside prisons, urging perpetrators and survivors alike to confront what forgiveness demands in a post-genocide society. One may not share his theological convictions, but it is difficult to dismiss the seriousness of a man who has devoted much of his life to making reconciliation practical. Though he has stepped away from administrative leadership, he continues to teach, preach, and write. He tells me he is working on three books at once, all on leadership, all written for a local audience. The pastor, it seems, is still building arguments for the country he believes in.

A sunny balcony

Chez Lando hasn’t changed much, and that’s perhaps its strength. The balcony still opens onto the restless Gisimenti road in Remera. Motorbikes cut through the afternoon, and conversations rise from nearby tables. Yet the trees between the hotel and the main road soften the chaos; and inside, Céline Dion hums through the speakers. Late-nineties pop, steady and faintly nostalgic. You are in the middle of the city but not overwhelmed by it.

I get there early, around half an hour past noon, and sit at a table overseeing the balcony. He arrives a few minutes past one, projects an open smile as he walks over and asks, “Rwabigwi?” I nod and say, “Yes.” It’s a little sunny outside, so he asks that we move indoors, and I follow him. Here we are, we have a table. My leather messenger bag also sits safely on the clean floor of the hotel restaurant, right there on the right side of my chair. I face the entrance and he faces inward. You can tell he prefers no distractions. And no doubt he is a regular at this hotel.

Rutayisire stands at about one metre sixty-five. He is in his late sixties, yet there is no sign of haste in his ageing. Dark-skinned, with a neat, close-cut afro and a clean shave, he carries himself without excess. When he sits, he does not dominate the table. When he enters the room, he does not claim it. And yet he is noticed. At least two passersby stop to greet him, quietly, almost ceremonially. His posture is humble, but his speech is almost certainly not.

Coffee, anyone?

I order black coffee. He asks for a latté. No sugar for the two, please. I ask if he’s had lunch, he says no, and that he intends to eat. I say I do not eat much around noon, to which he chuckles before emphasising, “I’ll get a meal.” But I never mind a light one for lunch when circumstances call for it.

We both sense this might run long, so we order food. He chooses fish filet with boiled matoke and greens. I go for beef meatballs, salad, and chips on the side (same thing I had last time I was at the restaurant). At least, this feels less like an interview than a deliberate pause in the day.

We begin with language.

“Do you speak Kinyarwanda?” he asks. With a long beard this month, I might be mistaken for something else. Or it is simply out of curiosity. The question is light, but it opens the door. He tells me he was “taught well” at university, and he is right. Rutayisire sat in Alexis Kagame’s classes at university back in the seventies. He says this plainly, but it carries weight. For him, language is inheritance, discipline, and structure. Being taught by a master is also no easy feat. And, of course, that itself is intriguing to me. What was it like to sit in historian Kagame’s classes? Then I recall a lecture on the subject by one Rwandan diplomat some seven or eight years ago, as the pastor explains how much value language, culture, and history carry altogether.

When I mention how succinct and exact his account of Rwanda’s history is in the introduction pages of his book, he leans forward. History, he says, has always held him. “I love transformation,” he adds. Not as a slogan, but as study. He is drawn to people who changed the course of events. “I have always been fascinated by those who changed the world,” he tells me. The sentence lands with conviction.

Rutayisire holds a master’s degree in education and a Doctorate in Philosophy for leadership. In addition to his own life experiences, he spent twelve years in the National Commission for Unity and Reconciliation and he is a founding member of the Rwanda Leaders Fellowship, a faith-based club that organises mostly prayer-breakfast events. So I believe him when he explains the correlation between his study of transformation and history.

“I have always been fascinated by those who changed the world.”

His own sense of curiosity began early. He started to learn to read before he began school. Not because he had to, because he wanted to. He recounts growing up as a curious child, always keeping himself busy with something to learn. Curiosity, for him, was not a phase.

He is articulate in recounting his upbringing as in other aspects of his life. He is clear about his pathways and what his story is. Much can be seen even in the way he presents events throughout his one-hundred-and-forty-page memoir. “I started reading before I set foot in primary school,” he tells me as his sips his latté. “I would always ask the people around me how to read letters, I started with A.” At that point he was five years old, and his dad had died. He goes on to tell me how the first books he ever touched were not from his home where he lived, but from a neighbouring family.

At one point in our conversation he remembers how much a biology textbook held so much for him to explore in those formative years. When he describes to me some of the things he read, growing up, like that chemistry textbook, he goes on to describe to me how chemical formulas or physics had fascinated him. He describes it all almost with a kind of zeal, I had to interject, to divert so he doesn’t go in his rabbit hole. But he is good at staying on course of his thought.

When his mother noticed willingness to learn, she brought him pieces of charcoal and showed him to use one old door made of galvanised sheet on which he could write his alphabets. “My mother maintained my curiosity,” he says, vividly remembering encouragement. He returns to that word — curiosity — often as if guarding it.

And then Rutayisire tells me, “The best way to keep your curiosity alive is to write.” I cannot guess how much he knows about my work and passion for writing, but I assume nothing. He speaks my language in some aspect, and I did not expect it. When I ask him how much writing he does, he doesn’t hesitate to tell me that much of what’ he’s been writing lately is meant for publication, not private notes. That makes a lot of sense. What do people do in retirement?

I had said to him earlier that I had wanted, before meeting with him, to visit his church and witness one of his services but then I read in the newspapers that he had retired. “Yes, I have,” he says, “but that’s in administration.” He tells me he would even teach this week. This reminds me that a man of God is always a man of God, a preacher of the Gospel. He doesn’t hesitate to remind you that he is a clergyman, and devoted servant. It is easy to forget this fact when listening to Pastor Rutayisire because he speaks mostly like an ordinary person. And that’s possibly what makes him a popular figure.

In recent years, Rutayisire has appeared frequently on YouTube commentaries. He has acted as a voice for not just reason but morality, appearing in video interviews across different channels. A quick search on the social platform will pull a set of sermons, interviews, and testimonials. He appears keen to meet and engage in conversations about social issues of the day, so it is easy to assume such a person is equally an avid consumer of social media. But he is not. When I try to find out whether he has a routine of reading the news daily, as do most educated, career-driven people I know, he refrains and tells me he does not. I am not sure how much I should believe him on that.

He tells me he likes paper, that he even drafts his manuscripts on paper before transcribing it on computer to send it to the editor. The only times he mentions YouTube is in reference to his interest in sports and history (Rutayisire mentioned World War II at least three times in our conversation).

What’s his day like? It starts with a prayer — Rutayisire tell me, every five a.m., he is part of a group that meets virtually “to pray for the nation.” One does not need to believe in the power of prayer to understand what it means. For a country with Rwanda’s past, such rituals carry weight.

None of what he told me about what he enjoys to do routinely was revealing much. He does, however, speak about sports quite a bit. He loves athleticism. But he does love to spend time with people in conversation and I can see it even in this every encounter. Rutayisire is a conversationalist, and I do not think he does articulate that description with accuracy yet (he doesn’t even need to). He tells me, I was “born to be lazy. To sit and do nothing.” And that’s exactly what he means. He enjoys slow living, as some would say. He tells me, to explain, if he did not have to go to another meeting, he would stay here with me and chat until late. I am afraid that would make him reveal more than he needs to.

Rutayisire also describes himself, half-amused, as stubborn at least in his childhood. But he does not like destructive or negative thinking, he says. “Anything that is not destructive, not negative, I will endorse.” Presence matters to him. He repeats it. “Nshimishwa n’igikorwa ndimo.” Even at weddings, meetings, and events, he tells me, he finds focus and follow that is going on. I tell his attention span is intact and our screen-bound generations certainly have much to learn here.

So you’re all into being present? I ask. “Yes, exactly. I love being present.” That phrase stays.

But I also learn he remains an avid reader. He loves reading and he reads stuff, almost obsessively. He might have enjoyed reading physics or chemistry: as a young and ambitious Rwandan, he certainly had an early urge to want to be successful, for both himself and his family.

We move to systems. He worries about what he calls “mono-thinking.” Single narratives. Closed frameworks. Anecdotes elevated into doctrine “How I think is not enough,” he says. Thinking must stretch beyond the self. Leadership, in his view, requires introspection but also scale. “We cannot lead with fragments.”

Leadership, politics?

Rutayisire is well aware of the risks that come with, what some would call, overexposure, especially on YouTube channels. He tells me somebody posted rumours about his death a few weeks ago. He also tells me that, at one point, some said he was interested in running for political office. He is quick to re-iterate that politics “is not my calling,” even without me asking. That can never happen, he tells me.

Rutayisire speaks of Rwanda with clarity, but without drama. Tolerance is not theory. It is survival. “The best way to live is to be tolerant,” he says. The sentence is simple, but it carries history inside it.

“What is there not to forgive given our history and context?”

At one point, the plates are cleared. The coffee cools. The music shifts to another familiar late-nineties voice. Outside, Remera continues its usual rhythm. Inside, Chez Lando remains steady, almost indifferent to the decades.

Before we leave, we return to literature — Kinyarwanda, French, and English. He speaks of teachers, of influence, or responsibility. When I inquired a little bit more about his understanding of reconciliation, he says, “Read the last chapter of my book,” smiling as if issuing homework, before continuing to say, “What is there not to forgive given our history and context?”

When it’s time for him to leave, we stand, I check if I have his number. He spells it out, and I do; I have it. Great. We then shake hands, and off he goes to his next meeting.

Have something to say about this story? Message the editor or write in the comments section below.