Phillip Cantrell's new book comes as a welcome contribution to the burgeoning academic literature on Rwanda's 1994 genocide, its history, and its aftermath. Specifically, Revival and Reconciliation is the first monograph to focus primarily on Rwanda's Anglican church, which despite its minority status has become increasingly politically and internationally salient in post-genocide Rwanda. In summary, Cantrell argues that the Anglican church's alternating historical postures of apolitical neutrality and church-state cohabitation have stripped it of any prophetic resistance to state authoritarianism. This left the church impotent or complicit in the face of mass violence in Rwanda, a pattern which Cantrell fears the Anglican church is repeating in the twenty-first century.
One of the great strengths of Revival and Reconciliation is the book's extended engagement with precolonial and colonial history. Following scholars such as Jan Vansina, David Newbury, and Alison Des Forges, Cantrell convincingly demonstrates that Rwanda's patterns of religious-political partnership and ethnic stratification were formed long before German, Belgian, and British missionaries arrived in the early twentieth century. Rather than the precolonial picture of “bucolic harmony” (22) painted by many post-genocide apologists, the nineteenth-century Nyiginya kingdom was marked by growing discrimination of Hutu by the Tutsi-dominated royal court. In turn, court biru, or spiritual advisors, strategically manipulated oral traditions to support the widening military conquests and territorial claims of the Nyiginya monarchy under Mwami (King) Rwabugiri (1863–1895). At the same time, Cantrell does not spare colonial Europeans from searing critique. It was Europeans like John Hanning Speke who introduced the Hamitic Thesis, the “original poison” (19) that falsely taught that Tutsi were Nilotic invaders who came from Ethiopia to conquer Rwanda's ancestral Hutu population. German and Belgian colonialists further hardened Hutu and Tutsi divisions through strategically favoring both the royal court and Tutsi chiefs. Cantrell's finely grained analysis of the European colonial project in Rwanda ensures that readers gain much more than a history of the Anglican church. In fact, this text could serve as a succinct introduction to Rwandan political history for undergraduate students.
But it is Cantrell's specific analysis of the Anglican church tradition that adds the most to scholarship on Rwanda. Drawing on an array of English-language secondary sources, U.K.-based archives, and three years of fieldwork in Rwanda, Cantrell paints a broad historical canvas. He shows how the legacy of Anglican-Catholic violence in neighboring Uganda led Rwanda's Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries to despise Catholics while carving out alternative ecclesial spaces around mission stations like Gahini. Deeply shaped by the Keswick holiness theology of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CiCCU) and the Bible Churchman's Missionary Society (BCMS), British medical missionaries like Leonard Sharp, A. S. Smith, and above all Joe Church established a pattern for Anglican engagement with Rwandan state and society. Namely, the “Ruanda Mission” would provide medical care, encourage personal conversion, and contribute to social development yet steer clear of any commentary on social or political controversies.
Cantrell's analysis of the 1930s East African Revival is especially illuminating. Much recent scholarship on the Revival has focused on the Ugandan context, and Cantrell helpfully shifts focus to Rwanda and Joe Church's Gahini mission, which served as one of the early centers of the “Aborokore” movement. Under the influence of the Revival, Anglican missionaries embraced pan-ethnic, interracial Christian language that stressed unity “at the foot of the Cross” (84). At the same time, such paeans to Christian spiritual solidarity overlooked the growing social and political stratifications of Hutu and Tutsi through Belgian-introduced identity cards, abusive labor practices, and the defenestration of Hutu chiefs.
As Catholic missionaries embraced Hutu liberation movements in the late 1950s, royalist Tutsi turned more and more to the Anglican missions. Mwami Rudahigwa frequented Church's Gahini mission, and rumors abounded that the king might convert from Catholicism. Yet Anglican missions also suffered for this association during the Hutu social revolution of 1959–1962. Several outstations were burnt to the ground, and thousands of Anglican Tutsi were driven into neighboring Uganda. The Anglican church remained a generally quiescent minority during the post-independence period of Hutu dominance under the Kayibanda and Habyarimana governments.
As conveyed by the book's title, the heart of Cantrell's book comes in the final chapter when he details the post-genocide rise of the Anglican church to an unofficial “state church” under the watchful eye of the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF). Dominated by Anglophone Tutsi who grew up in Uganda, the Anglican Church of Rwanda (PEAR) has combined charismatic-style worship practices, significant international development dollars, and influential reconciliation ministries under figures such as Bishop Emmanuel Kolini and Bishop John Rucyahana. The discourse of the East African Revival has been refashioned to downplay ethnic difference, portraying Rwanda as a “chosen people” leading a global “Spiritual Renaissance” (130) with headquarters at Gahini. At the same time, Cantrell castigates Anglican bishops’ silence in the face of RPF human rights abuses, as well as Anglican leaders’ willingness to serve as intellectual apologists for the RPF's whitewashing of precolonial history.
By bringing the Anglican story to the center, Cantrell's Revival and Reconciliation offers an original and noteworthy contribution to historiography on Rwanda. There are gaps in his analysis, however. First, Cantrell needs to devote more space to analyzing Anglican relationships with the post-independence Hutu state, up to and including the genocidal regime of 1994. For example, Cantrell claims that “numerous pregenocide Anglican bishops were vocal in their support of Habyarimana's regime and supported the genocide” (117), but he only spends one paragraph developing this claim. The book would also benefit from more engagement with indigenous African voices during the colonial and postcolonial periods, moving beyond the select British missionaries that dominate the narrative. In turn, while Cantrell reflects an impressive grasp of English-language literature on Rwanda, he almost wholly ignores Francophone literature on Rwanda. The dated nature of his 2004–2007 fieldwork also makes it difficult to sustain some of his later claims about contemporary Anglican politics in Rwanda. And although his critical perspective on the post-genocide Anglican church is surely warranted, one could hope for more balance and nuance, breaking down some of the competing voices beyond the Kolini/Rucyahana mainstream.
These concerns notwithstanding, Phillip Cantrell's Revival and Reconciliation is a well-written, comprehensive, and accessible history of the Anglican church, religion, and politics in Rwanda. It deserves a wide readership.
