Rwanda

The population of Rwanda, a small landlocked state in East Africa, is more than 90% Christian and 2%–4% Muslim. Many people simultaneously continue to practice aspects of Rwandan indigenous religion, particularly veneration of ancestors and traditional healing practices. A small percentage of the population observe Kubandwa, the worship of the heroic figures Nyabingi and Lyangombe.

Catholic missionaries arrived in Rwanda in 1900. Focusing on proselytizing the elite, they were highly successful at winning converts and gaining political influence. The missionaries favored the minority Tutsi, who dominated the political system, and their policies helped solidify ethnic identity and consolidate Tutsi power. In the 1950s, however, the missionaries switched sympathy to the Hutu majority. Many people blame the Catholic Church for instigating the 1959 uprising, which drove the Tutsi king and chiefs from power and drove thousands of Tutsi into exile in neighboring countries.

German Protestant missionaries began work in Rwanda in 1907, but their efforts were disrupted by World War I. Seventh-Day Adventist missionaries next came to Rwanda in 1919, and Belgian Protestants took over the abandoned German mission stations in 1920, establishing the Presbyterian Church of Rwanda. Anglicans arrived when the eastern region of Gisaka was incorporated into Rwanda in 1932, and Anglicanism quickly became the predominant Protestant denomination in Rwanda. Both Danish Baptists and American Free Methodists expanded mission work into southern Rwanda in the 1930s from Burundi. Swedish Pentecostal missionaries arrived in Rwanda from Congo in 1940. The Protestant presence in Rwanda gradually grew, so that in the 1991 census, 27.2% of the population was Protestant compared with 62.6% Catholic.

After independence in 1962, the new government had close ties with the Catholic Church. The first president, Grégoire Kayibanda, had served as editor of a Catholic newspaper and directed a church consumers’ cooperative. After the 1973 coup, the new president, Juvénal Habyarimana, maintained a close relationship with the Church. Although some Protestant and Catholic groups were in opposition to the Habyarimana regime that emerged in the early 1990s, both Catholic and Protestant leaders supported the regime.

In April 1994, after President Habyarimana was assassinated in a plane crash, a policy of ethnic scapegoating the minority Tutsi culminated in genocide. The Christian churches became deeply implicated in the violence, as church leaders urged the population to support the government even as it was massacring civilians. Churches became [Page 1107]Rwanda's primary killing fields, as Tutsis were lured to church buildings with promises of sanctuary and then systematically slaughtered.

Rwanda's religious landscape evolved significantly after the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a mostly Tutsi rebel army, took control of the country in July 1994 and ended the genocide. Because of their culpability in the violence, the established Catholic and Protestant churches lost much of their influence and many of their members. Tutsi refugees who returned to Rwanda after 1994 brought a diversity of new denominations to the country, and many new independent evangelical and Pentecostal churches emerged. Islam also became more public and prominent.