Your location>Home>Publications>Articles>General>Us and Them
Download the entire article
When she returned home, her hosts told her she had to call to find out the time of the Meeting. It was 11:00 a.m. and so the next Sunday she attended her first unprogrammed Meeting for Worship. After Meeting she met Mary Holmes who told me this story. Mary and her husband, Ed, had been with the US State Department in Kenya in the early 1960’s so Mary was familiar with Kenya and Kenyans. She asked Gladys if she had any children in the United States. Gladys said, “No”. Did she have any family in the US? Gladys said, “No”. Mary was sad to see that Gladys had no one around to relate to, but Gladys responded, “But I have you”, meaning the Quaker community. Mary says that she was so touched by this response.
So the question is, can you go to Kenya and go to a programmed Meeting for Worship and feel that you are at home? In other words, do you see Kenyan Quakers as “us” or as “them”?
In English we have two words, “guest” who is one of us and “stranger” who is one of them. In Swahili there is only one word, mgeni, which means both guest and stranger. In other words strangers are treated like guests. Americans who do go to visit Kenyans are often overwhelmed by how warm and friendly the Kenyans are.
These are rather benign examples. Let me give you a much more serious one. In the conflicts in Rwanda and Burundi, the “us” and “them” was Hutu versus Tutsi. Since everyone speaks the same language, has the same culture, lives side-by-side, and frequently inter-married, this Tutsi/Hutu divide had to be manufactured. Again there could be no one in the middle as everyone was the group of their father regardless of the group of their mother. So when the Tutsi soldiers in Burundi in 1993 ordered the students to go on one side if they were Hutu and the other if they were Tutsi, the sister-in-law of David Niyonzima, the former General Secretary of Burundi Yearly Meeting, stayed in the center because she was half Tutsi and half Hutu. The soldiers killed her.
Adrien Niyongabo is the Coordinator of the Healing and Rebuilding Our Community program in Burundi, sponsored by the African Great Lakes Initiative. The initials are H-R-O-C and this is pronounced “He-Rock”. He was born and raised in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi. When he was 7 his father left his mother and returned up-country. His mother was a Tutsi so Adrien thought he was a Tutsi – as with race no one ever tells you what ethnicity you are and you have to figure it out yourself. Then when he was a teenager he decided to find his “roots” and searched for his father upcountry. He met his father and found out that his father was a Hutu so Adrien, who thought he was a Tutsi, was now a Hutu. This led to ironic consequences:
In October 1993, the death of the first Hutu elected president gave rise to a new round of massacres between Hutu and Tutsi. The night of the 23rd, the governmental military, attacked my suburb. The Hutu were forced to leave the area or to hide themselves. As many others did, I followed the queue toward the hills surrounding Bujumbura. Unfortunately, after just one mile, I was stopped by two men with guns; stopped and forbidden to follow the others. Before I could even ask why, they added that I was a Tutsi who followed the Hutu so that I could investigate how things were settled and maybe go back to tell the governmental [Tutsi] army. “So, we are going to kill you,” they said. I kept quiet waiting, expecting to see God in few seconds.
In a short time, a man came up to where we were and asked them what I was doing there. They answered him the same way they had told me before. And the man said, “Please, I know who is his Father, who is his Mum. He is a Hutu as we are. Let him join the others.” One of the two men asked him: “Do you know him really”? The man responded by saying, “Yes, yes!!!” Turning to me, the two men with guns said, “You are saved, guy. You can keep on following others”! Could I believe it? Like a new morning, the dark night looked to me. My life was given back to me again. Praise the Lord! This entire incident came from the stereotypes, which we use in Burundi to say that this person is a Hutu or Tutsi. In some cases, one can be totally wrong, mostly with our patriarchal system, where one relies on his father’s ethnic group independently from the mother’s ethnic group. This event encouraged me to have an inward look. Many other innocent Burundians – men, women, girls, boys – like me I thought, would have been murdered in similar circumstances. I felt great bitterness and wished that I would get an opportunity to participate in reconciling the two groups.
