‘Far from having unity, we are tending towards total disunity’: The Catholic Major Seminary in Rwanda, 1950–62

Abstract

As the final training ground for local African men preparing for the Roman Catholic priesthood, Nyakibanda Major Seminary produced record numbers of priests in the 1940s and 1950s, symbolising the growth and vitality of the mid-century Rwandan Catholic Church. Between 1952 and 1962, however, the seminary experienced waves of seminarian withdrawals as interracial, nationalist and ethnicist tensions divided the Nyakibanda community. Nyakibanda's late colonial history demonstrates the mutability of ethnic and nationalist identities, highlights the importance of institutional politics and reveals the Rwandan church's failure to offer a counter-narrative to the zero-sum Hutu–Tutsi dialectic that swept Rwandan society in the 1950s and early 1960s.