Refleksion over foredrag om folkedrab i Rwanda

Father Aloys Mahwa is a Jesuit priest and scholar who came to The University of Scranton fro, Rwanda which is in East Africa. The title of his presentation was, “Rwanda: A Society in Transition”. Going into the presentation I really did not know what to expect. I was not familiar with Rwanda, beyond that it was in Africa. It turned out that Fr. Mahwa not only heads a grade school in Rwanda called St. Ignace Primary School, but he also is in charge of a center called the Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Center. Fr. Mahwa explained his involvements and research regarding genocide. Genocide is, as defined by the Holocaust Encyclopedia, violent crimes made towards specific groups with the goal of destroying the existence of that group. Specifically in Africa, Fr. Mahwa said that one specific incident in 1994, there were over 700,000 people murdered in Rwanda. He went on to explain that this was tied to the assassination of Rwanda’s president, Juvenal Habyarimana. I could go on saying all of the things he said, showed and demonstrated during his lecture, but what I really got out of it was how it made me feel. I’ve never been to Rwanda or even El Salvador and I am so used to American culture that hearing this stories and the hatred that these people had inside of them astonishes me. As naive as it may sound I just cannot fathom how a person could justify killing and mass murdering as “okay”. Needless to say this was an eye opening and enlightening lecture. It is almost like a present day culture in which I can use my own as a baseline to compare, which I often am doing in this class with learning about the early Christians.