A Roundabout Revolution: Rethinking the Decolonization of Rwanda by the Practices of the Catholic Scouting Movement, 1954–1964

Abstract

Modelling itself on the organizational structure and the physical fitness culture of Catholic scouting, the xaveri movement in Rwanda developed within a climate which was highly susceptible to the development of deep racial and political divisions. Between 1954 and 1964, this Catholic youth organization was influential in the gestation of a Christian democratic culture which was one of the essential elements of the ideology behind the ‘Hutu revolution’. Covering the colonial to the postcolonial period and from the angle of the rise of the xaveri movement, this paper shows how the ‘Hutu revolution’ was a consequence of a liberation struggle from an imagined oppressor. This is in reference to colonial privileges attributed (until the end of the 1940s) to the Tutsi minority. However, and still from the perspective of the organization explored here, it seems that the model of the ‘civilised Tutsi’ targeted by the revolutionary Hutu movement was the essential referent of the more subconscious invention by republican leaders.