The anniversary of the Rwandan genocide reminded me of a paragraph from Ken Ham’s book One Race, One Blood:

“Grace victories are often preceded by periods of confusion and setbacks. Celestin is a Hutu from Rwanda. In 1994, Tutsis killed 7 members of his family and 70 members of his church. As a Christian, Celestin, who married a Tutsi, was confused by the call of grace to seek out members of the Tutsi tribe to offer forgiveness. At his first attempt to offer forgiveness, Tutsis beat him and Hutus imprisoned him a traitor. Celestin is completing his doctrinal dissertation for Dallas Theological Seminary on forgiveness! He leads a ministry in war-torn African nations teaching leadership and reconciliation. Grace relations often call us to overcome the natural confusion of the circumstances that would naturally lead us to segregation!”

If you know anything at all about the Rwandan genocide, this should jump out at you as an obvious mistake. The 1994 Rwandan genocide was a genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutu! There were Hutu killed in the genocide, but most of them were killed by other Hutu because they were thought to be Tutsi sympathizers. So why would a Hutu be forgiving the Tutsis?

At first I assumed that Celestin obviously must be a Tutsi and Ken Ham had just made an embarrassing mistake and his editors had missed it… through multiple editions. Yes, that seems like a lot of incompetence, but I don’t have much faith in either Ken Ham or his editors.

But it turns out I was wrong. Not about Ken Ham or his editors, they got plenty of other things wrong including the year and number of family members killed. But Celestin Musekura is in fact Hutu. And Ken Ham is far from the only Christian source to get the details wrong. This article from the Christian Reformed Church directly accuses the Tutsi, the victims of the genocide, of doing the things the Hutus did:

“Driven on by Tutsi rebels who called for the killing of Hutus, whom they referred to as “cockroaches” over the radio, the carnage spread widely as neighbors and friends and family members — because of intermarriage — turned on one another.

‘In Rwanda, people didn’t know how to respond when such a situation happened —’ when the Tutsi tribe went on a rampage, wielding machetes, hatchets, and knives, and tried to wipe out the Hutus, who had been in power, said Musekura.”

Most of the stories about Celestin Musekura confuse the timeline, presumably because it doesn’t sound so great when you put it in order. As best I can piece it together, this is the full story.

In the 1980s, Musekura left Rwanda for theological training in Kenya. Most sources state that he was still in Kenya in 1994 during the genocide of the Tutsi by the Hutus, although the website for the organization he founded, African Leadership and Reconciliation Ministries (ALARM), claims he is a survivor. Even if he was in the country, claiming to be a survivor would be odd as he was not a member of the ethnic group being targeted. You don’t hear the term “Holocaust survivor” applied to non-Jewish German citizens, even those who hid Jewish people in their homes.

In the summer of 1994, when the Hutu leaders told the Hutu to flee to avoid retaliation for the genocide, Musekura’s family, along with millions of other Hutus, wound up in refugee camps in what was then Zaire. These refugees included the government, army and militias that presided over the genocide, as well as many individuals who participated in the genocide.

Following the genocide, Musekura returned to Rwanda and founded ALARM. According to their website, “His goal was to help Christians, many of whom were perpetrators of the violence, to seek reconciliation and find peace over the horrible things that had happened.” This is the time period Ken Ham is referring to as Musekura’s “first attempt at forgiveness”, the time between 1994 and 1997 when Musekura was beaten and imprisoned in Rwanda. Here’s Musekura’s account from his book, An Assessment of Contemporary Models of Forgiveness:

“During the years 1994 through 1997, I experienced personal rejection, threats, beatings, torture, and false accusations of being a traitor to my own tribe and an enemy of the Tutsi government in Rwanda because I called both Hutus and Tutsis to consider forgiveness and reconciliation as the only way out of our social and spiritual nightmares. The ministry and message of reconciliation through repentance and forgiveness was not needed in the wake of the genocide inside Rwanda and the death of the mass of Hutus in the refugee camps (death camps) in Congo and Tanzania. Hatred, revenge, retribution, violence, and demonization of the other tribe—these seemed to make more sense for both communities than forgiveness.””During the years 1994 through 1997, I experienced personal rejection, threats, beatings, torture, and false accusations of being a traitor to my own tribe and an enemy of the Tutsi government in Rwanda because I called both Hutus and Tutsis to consider forgiveness and reconciliation as the only way out of our social and spiritual nightmares. The ministry and message of reconciliation through repentance and forgiveness was not needed in the wake of the genocide inside Rwanda and the death of the mass of Hutus in the refugee camps (death camps) in Congo and Tanzania. Hatred, revenge, retribution, violence, and demonization of the other tribe—these seemed to make more sense for both communities than forgiveness.”

Note that at this time, Musekura isn’t a victim of anything. His family is still alive. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (R.P.F) was carrying out retaliatory extrajudicial killings against the Hutus during this time period, but he doesn’t mention any personal impact of this anywhere before December 1997. As far as I can tell, he just showed up as a member of the perpetrating class of the genocide and wandered around telling the victims he forgave them and they should forgive too. And preaching about Jesus when nuns and priests actively took part in the genocide. I’m not saying this justifies violence, but I can see why that wasn’t taken well.

At some point in 1997, Musekura goes to Dallas Theological seminary in the US. While he’s in the US, on December 28, 1997, five members of his family were killed “because of revenge that followed the genocide”. This was almost certainly an attack by the R.P.F, which was supposed to be trying to seek justice by finding the perpetrators who fled, but has been accused of indiscriminate killing and unnecessary cruelty in their attacks, and innocent people were also killed. At least some members of Musekura’s church were, both statistically and by his own testimony, perpetrators of genocide. That doesn’t justify extrajudicial killing, but it is important context.

This context is relevant to the narrative around forgiveness that Christian circles are trying to frame around this story. They portray Musekura as an ideal Christian, able to forgive even those who murdered his family. But this doesn’t seem impressive to me in context. It’s easy to see that two wrongs don’t make a right when you’re the victim of the second wrong! Preaching forgiveness when people are seeking revenge on you and your loved ones is self-serving. Furthermore, Musekura repeatedly states that he forgives the not the individuals who killed his family, nor even the R.P.F. army, but the Tutsis. This is problematically racist. It implies that Tutsis as an ethnic group are guilty of killing his family, which is obviously not the case. This kind of thinking reinforces the conflicts between ethnic groups.

After some research, I can see why Christian groups tend to blur the details around Celestin Musekura. The actual story simply does not fit their narrative.