“In the Black Color of the Night”: Theology and Philosophy in Exile

The context was a workweek, organized in the framework of research on the history of arts education in Lubumbashi and in Congo. These studies were undertaken in collaboration with a cluster of other working groups, as part of “Another Roadmap for Art Education,” a network of educators, artists, and researchers from around the world, initiated by the Institute for Artistic Education, at the Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK. At the level of the African continent, working groups there included Johannesburg (Keleketla! Library and Wits), Kampala in Uganda, Nyanza/Huye in Rwanda, Maseru in Lesotho, and Cairo in Egypt. See: →. Lubumbashi was once a significant location where a number of important philosophers studied, lived, and worked, most notably V. Y. Mudimbe, a Congolese philosopher, poet, and novelist concerned with the formations of African cultures and the continent’s intellectual histories.

See: Genocide Archive Rwanda, →. “In less than a hundred days, more than 800,000 Rwandese people were murdered in a deliberate and well-organized act of genocide, orchestrated by then-members of the Rwandan government. The genocidal regime targeted the Tutsi population and moderate Hutu who opposed the killings. Many Hutu and Twa also lost their lives as the genocide unfolded in the context of a civil war between the Hutu-dominated government and a Tutsi-dominated rebel movement, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The killings started on the 6th of April, following a rocket attack that caused a plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi to crash. Despite the presence of a considerable UN peacekeeping force at the outbreak of the violence, the international community failed to intervene, pulling most of their forces out and ignoring any pleas for help. This failure to act allowed the killings to continue until the 4th of July, when Rwandan Patriotic Front forces, then led by the current president Paul Kagame, were able to take control of the country, ousting those responsible for the genocide from the country.” African Study Centre, University of Leiden →.

Patrice Nganang, Manifeste d’une nouvelle litterature africaine: pour une écriture préemptive (Éditions Homnisphères, 2007), 36; quoted in Michael Syrotinski, “The Post-Genocidal African Subject: Patrice Nganang, Achille Mbembe and the Worldlinesss of Contemporary African Literature in French”, in Transnational French Studies: Postcolonialism and Littérature-monde, eds. Alec G. Hargreaves, Charles Forsdick, and David Murphy (Liverpool University Press, 2010), 274-86, 276.

Either because he doesn’t know such a text, or because such a text doesn’t exist, or because if it does, as is sure, it’s not distributed widely enough to have reached the likes of him.

Mahmood Mamdani, Understanding the Crisis in Kivu: Report of the CODESRIA Mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo, September 1997 (CODESRIA), 2001.

Timothy Longman, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda (Cambridge University Press), 2009, 55-58.

Longman, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda, 55-58.

Longman, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda, 55-58.

Kasereka Kavwahirehi, “Have we failed Christianity? Or How violence in the Great Lakes Region Challenges Christianity and the Nation State,” in Citizenship Studies 21, no. 2 (2017): 210–23. “From Placide Tempels, author of La philosophie bantoue (1945), to Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, author of Muntu in Crisis: African Authenticity and Philosophy (2014) and Christianity without Fetishes: Revelation and Domination (1981), and V.Y. Mudimbe’s Tales of Faith: Religion as Political Performance (1997) through to La philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l’être (1956) by Alexis Kagame, Visage africain du christianisme (1965) by Vincent Mulago, and African Religions and Philosophy (1969) by John Mbiti, not to mention L’Afrique dans l’Église: Paroles d’un croyant by Engelbert Mveng, Afriques indociles: Christianisme, pouvoir et État en société postcoloniale (1988) by Achille Mbembe, and Théologie africaine pour temps de crise (1993) by Kä Mana ... all these scholars bear witness to the challenges and issues born from extending to Africa a bourgeois Christian model of being. Hence, theologies of cultural identity, liberation or reconstruction, ethnophilosophy and critical philosophies represent moments when Africans try to recover coherence in their individual and collective lives by inscribing themselves in the open horizon of colonial modernity and the evangelising mission. This involves trying to think critically about the integration of traditional values in the modern world while ensuring that modernity fulfils its promises within the African experience of history.” p. 215.

Kavwahirehi, “Have we failed Christianity?” 210-23.

Christian Nyampeta, Comment vivre ensemble, conversation with Dr. Fr. Fabien Hagenimana, September 2015.

Kavwahirehi, “Have we failed Christianity?” 212.

Abbé Smaragde Mbonyintege, “L’urgence de l’inculturation du message chrétien dans la tradition rwandaise,” in Urunani (Nyakibanda Seminary Press, 1979), 23–24. My translation from French.

My article “One’s Own Rhythm” addresses Christianity as the rhythm of modernity. See Nyampeta, “One’s Own Rhythm: Footnotes to How To Live Together,” in That, Around Which The Universe Revolves: On Rhythmanalysis of Memory, Times, Bodies in Space, ed. Savvy Contemporary (Archive Books, forthcoming).

Bénézet Bujo, Foundations of an African Ethics: Beyond the Universal Claims of Western Morality, trans. Brian McNeil (The Crossroad Publishing Company,2001), 96, quoted in Kavwahirehi, “Have we failed Christianity?” 218. See also Jane Linden and Ian Linden, Church and Revolution in Rwanda (Africana Publishing Company, 1997).

Kavwahirehi, “Have we failed Christianity?” 212.

Kavwahirehi, “Have we failed Christianity?” 212.

Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, Christianisme sans fétiche: Révélation ou domination (Christianity without Fetishes: Revelation or Domination) (Présence Africaine, 1981). Quoted in Kavwahirehi, “Have we failed Christianity?”

Kavwahirehi, “Have we failed Christianity?” 212.

Bénézet Bujo, Foundations of an African Ethics, 96. Quoted in Kavwahirehi, “Have we failed Christianity?” 212.

Nzeyimana cofounded and directed the former Nile Polytechnic of Applied Arts, an arts and architecture school located in Huye, Rwanda. Nzeyimana is also a lecturer at the National University of Rwanda, also in Huye, and at the Grand Séminaire Philosophicum in Kabgayi, the only university with a philosophy department in Rwanda. Nzeyimana is the founder and director of ARPHI (Association Rwandaise pour la Philosophie). Nzeyimana’s main philosophical contributions are in the field of education and political theory. His books are used as textbooks by Rwandan students in the humanities and social sciences. Some of these many books include: Finalités de l’Éducation: essaie d’une anthropologie philosophique au Rwanda (2000), Philosophie et rationalités: philosophie de la connaissance, des sciences, de l’homme et de la société (2010), L’Afrique et son concept: Penser le développement de l’Afrique avec Hegel (2017), and Philosophie et rationalités Livre I: Introduction générale à la philosophie: Qu’est-ce la Philosophie? (2018).

Examples of this interest include Joseph Kalinganire, L’Autre face de la raison: principles odologiques de la rationalité bantu–rwandaise, PhD thesis (Université de Fribourg, 1987); Fabien Hagenimana, Le statut de l'altérité chez Joseph de Finance, PhD thesis (Pontificia Universitas Sanctae Crucis, Philosophy Department, 2008); and Sylvestre Nzahabwanayo, Authentic and Inauthentic Existence: Martin Heidegger versus Gabriel Marcel (Lampert Academic Publishing, 2012).

Outstanding work on this topic was done by the late Alexis Kagame, a Rwandan philosopher, linguist, historian, poet, and Catholic priest born in Kiyanza in 1912. He died in 1981 in Nairobi. His primary philosophical contributions were in the field of ethnophilosophy. His main works are La Philosophie Bantu-Rwandaise de l'Être (1956), an analysis of the concept of “Being” in Kinyarwanda and Rwandan culture; and La Philosophie Bantu Comparée (1976), a broader study including all the Bantu languages. In these works, Kagame attempts to demonstrate that the structure of Bantu languages reveals a complex ontology that is uniquely African in nature.

Terence Ball, “Theory and Practice: An Examination of the Platonic and Aristotelian Conceptions of Political Theory,” The Western Political Quarterly 25, no. 3 (September 1972), 539­–40.

Ball, “Theory and Practice,” 539–40.

Ball, “Theory and Practice,” 539–40, quoting Aristotle, Politics 7. 2. § 3.

Arlene W. Saxonhouse, “Democracy, Equality, and Eidê: A Radical View from Book 8 of Plato’s Republic,” American Political Science Review 92, no. 2 (June 1998): 273–83, 278.

Roland Barthes, How To Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Living Spaces, trans. Kate Briggs (Columbia University Press, 2013). “Idiorrhythmy,” which means “one’s own rhythm,” is the subject of these lectures. It is a notion of political theology, denoting the pre-monastic ascetic formations of the Desert Fathers and Mothers that flourished in the fourth century in the Egyptian desert. Drawing from literature, and carrying out what he calls a “novelistic simulation of some living spaces,” Barthes develops his ideas about a community in which every member has the right to live according to her or his own rhythm, without being expelled by the group. The lectures are an “ethical enquiry (how to conceive of the relationship between the subject and the other),” and they are also a moral study “on the condition that we invest the word with a concrete and practical dimension.” Claude Coste, “Preface,” in Barthes, How To Live Together, xxi.

Ivan Kologrivof, Essai sur la sainteté en Russie (Bruges, 1953), 430. Quoted in Kallistos Ware, “The Way of the Ascetics: Negative or Affirmative?” in Asceticism, eds. Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis (Oxford University Press, 1995), 7.

Nahum Dimitri Chandler, Toward an African Future: Of the Limit of the World (Living Commons, 2013). Living Commons Collective is an experimental publishing imprint run by philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva and theorist Rashné Limki. It is “set amid and apart from neoliberal practices wherein sterilization of thought is lucrative business and from autonomist practices that have ceded themselves a peculiar racial valence,” and its output is “a reflection of the inherent counter-disciplinarity of thinking.” It traces “the political as constituted across the various modes of the creative and the material, that is, the ideational, the emotional, and the spiritual.”

T. J. Demos, “A Colonial Hauntology: Vincent Meessen’s Vita Nova,” in Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013). See also Gauz, “Les Rêves de Kong de Binger,” in Penser et écrire l’Afrique Aujourd’hui, ed. Alain Mabanckou (Seuil, 2017), 182–88.

Longman, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda.

Maniragaba Balibutsa, Les Perspectives de la pensée philosophique Bantu-Rwandaise après Alexis Kagame (Editions Université Nationale du Rwanda, 1985), 14. My translation from French. My full translation of Les Perspectives is forthcoming in 2019.

Balibutsa, Les Perspectives, 13. My translation from French.

Maniragaba Balibusta is a late Rwandan philosopher whose last known position was Maître de Conference at the University of Omar Bongo in Gabon. His main philosophical contributions are in the field of contemporary Rwandan philosophy, resting on two primary works: Les Perspectives de la pensée philosophique Bantu-Rwandaise après Alexis Kagame (1985), a study that attempts to further Kagame’s linguistic and philosophical work; and Une archéologie de la violence en Afrique des grands lacs (Editions du CICIBA, 2000), an anthropological and philosophical analysis of violence in Rwanda and neighboring countries. In his more philosophical work, Balibusta, like Kagame, insists that the Bantu languages reveal ontological structures that defy Western paradigms. Some saw Balibusta as one of the intellectual leaders of Hutu culture before 1994.

Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Leçons sur la philosophie de l’histoire). Available in English as Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Volume 1: Manuscripts of the Introduction and the Lectures of 1822–3, ed. and trans. Robert F. Brown, William G. Geuss, and Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Hegel, La Raison dans l’histoire, trans. Kortas Papaioannou (Éditions Plon, 1965), 185. Available in English as The Philosophy of World History, ed. and trans. John Sibree (Dover), 1956.

Dismas A. Masolo, “Philosophy and Indigenous Knowledge: An African Perspective,” in “Oral Heritage and Indigenous Knowledge,” special issue, Africa Today 50, no. 2 (Autumn–Winter, 2003), 21-38, 23.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne, “Le philosophe africain comme traducteur” (African Philosopher as Translator), lecture at the Collège de France, May 2, 2016 →. Published as Souleymane Bachir Diagne, “Le philosophe africain comme traducteur,” in Alain Mabanckou, Penser et écrire l’Afrique aujourd’hui. My translation from the French.

Syrotinski, “The Post-Genocidal African Subject."

Our hosts included artist Epa Binamungu, philosopher and musician Fr. Fabien Hagenimana, cinematographer Georges Kamanayo, philosopher and historian Abbé Vedaste Kayisabe, mythologist Rose Marie Mukarutabana, sculptor Jean Sebukangaga, artist Crista Uwase, and architect Marie Noelle Akingeneye Uwera.

Aloys Bigirumwami was the first African Bishop of the Belgian colonies and the sixth African Catholic Bishop. He was born in 1904 and died 1986. He was an adept thinker and pedagogue, who worked tirelessly to reunify the Rwandese people in his lifetime, in the realms of politics, theology, and culture. His enormous corpus of manuscripts published by the diocese of Nyundo focuses on the tradition, thought, and locution of Rwanda. He is credited with building schools and hospitals in Rwanda, and for promoting girls’ education in general, including the first secondary school for girls, and the first and only remaining school of art, l’École d’art de Nyundo.

Jean Paul Martinon, After “Rwanda”: In Search of a New Ethics (Rodopi, 2013), 279.

Martinon, After “Rwanda,” 280.

Christiane Chaulet-Achour, “Writing as Exploratory Surgery: Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence,” in Yambo Ouologuem: Postcolonial Writer, Islamic Militant, ed. Christopher Wise (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999).