Many people set morally high standards for educated people. This is fundamentally because we are raised to believe that education makes people “ladies” and “gentlemen”. Hence, there are things that are considered to be “below” some of the most educated and elite people. In spite of this, there are many things that points that the reverse is true. One can hardly rationalize the reason why the most literate and most elite nation on earth, Germany perpetrated the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s. This paper argues that although education often leads to enlightenment, it does not necessarily equal to virtue.
The Rwandan Genocide is viewed from a distance by most people who only struggle to understand how 800,000 Hutus could be murdered by their own countrymen, Tutsis in a short space of 100 days. There are questions like whether the people had any form of education or not. There are questions of why so much hatred could grow and rise in a nation. At least, Rwanda is known to be very religious and with some of the most elite institutions in the world. Yet, people could kill each other and organize others to hate so much and do what they did in 1994.
Bobacar Boris Diop explains the kind of situation that prevailed in Rwanda in Murambai. The book has the advantage of hindsight and provides the reader with the different worldviews that prevailed in the period before and after the Rwandan Genocide. Obviously, the book shows that it was not so simple. People had their motivations and justifications for their involvement in the genocide.
The book, Muramabi is about a Rwandan, Cornelius Uvimana who was away in the period of the genocide, working as a teacher in Djibouti whilst the events before the genocide occurred. Cornelius returned to Rwanda in 1998, four years after the genocide and has the perspective of an outsider who understands his people’s culture and could give perspective on it. This was a period where things were charged and there was still a lot of hate and tension between Rwandans who were locked into the heat of the situation. Thus, Cornelius with his view of an insider who was not entangled with this enables him to take the views and submissions of different people rationalize and internalize them in order to portray it within the context of the novel.
The different people with different worldviews in the book shows that there were various biases and moral frameworks that people held about each other. This either contributed to the war by justifying the hate and tension or led to some kind of holding back and going defensive which contributed to the entire situation.
Some authors identify that morality and ethics are independent from academic knowledge and productivity. This is because the essence of the Protestant Reformation that led to the creation of full-time education as a counter training system in the 1700s was done within a context where morality was fairly homogenous and universal. Thus, the idea of education was done within a context that was rigid and definite. However, in today’s world of globalization and in our tilt towards secularism, education is fundamentally skewed towards productivity, rational results and legality.
Furthermore, in today’s pluralist societies where Constitutions around the world guarantee freedom of religion, thought and conscience, there is no universally defined body of ethics and morality. People are free to set up their own standards of right and wrong. Thus, education is independent and carried out in vacuum. This is because when education tries to impart religion and ethics or morality in one context, it is likely to lead to many controversies and divisions. Therefore, most nations and communities avoid morality and ethics.
Thus, in line with this changing world with no universal set of ethics, people are left to form their own views and perceptions of what is right and what is wrong. This seem to be the kind of situation that led to the framework of the events that led to the Rwandan Genocide. The characters in Murambai seem to have their own motivations and justifications for the things they had. This is a sign of a multi-ethical system of defining what is right and wrong.
Faustina Gasana shows in her narration that the Hutus had done a lot of wrong to her people from colonial days and in this situation. The symbolism of the Tutsi leaders in Belgian times as the preferred people who were betrayed in the colonial people shows that the Hutus were dangerous and had done many negative things that had caused what she believes to be the biggest problems and pain for her people. Therefore, there was a perception of hate and anger towards the Hutus from the Tutsis. And at the microcosmic level, there was a desire to do something to contain them.
Tutsi nationalism meant that they had to keep pictures of their own heroes and talk about their ethnic group as an entity distinct from the Hutus. Thus, the idea of a unified nation and a moral desire to fight for the advancement of the nation as a unified entity was absolutely missing. In the space created, there was a strong desire for aggression against the Hutus in order to keep the Tutsi race going. There is no sense of a world outside Rwanda. To the Tutsis, it was all about their tribe and their honor. Nothing else mattered.
“Do those people [Hutus] take us for real men or for women?”. This refers to a father talking to his daughter. Obviously, the Hutus had reified the name of the Tutsis as “cockroaches”. Reification is viewed by sociologists as the formulation of a theory or concept by its regular usage in a given language. This forms the worldview and conceptions of people. It defines the subconscious minds of people and get them to build their mindset about things. Clearly, from this section of the book, ordinary Tutsis viewed the Hutus as people who disrespected them and they saw it as an obligation to show them a lesson. The kind of social experiences people gained and the kind of information given to them in the media and at home, shaped the software of their minds and overshadowed any kind of education. This gave no room for objective virtues, but the blinded hatred and disdain for their Hutu neighbors.
Others justified the hatred as something that goes back to 1959. There was anger and there was some kind of need and desire for people to rise up and use violence and mob action to deal with what they believe to be a perpetual problem upon them as a people.
However, the hatred and disdain goes beyond 1959. It is about years of no effort or attempt to deal with the internal dislike they had for each other. This shows that morality and the need for elders and authoritative figures to ask for ways of dealing with conflicts and disagreements between members of different groups. Education is not all about literacy and academic competency. Rather, it is about good governance and leadership policies that united a people and helped to deal with moral problems like ethnocentrisms and sectarianism. The lack of these intervening factors meant that conflicts spanned beyond generations and was internalized at home and used to train future generations which leads to major problems and matters.
Forgiveness was clearly missing in the development of Rwanda from Belgian colonialism where the division and hate seem to be a useful tool for colonizing the country. After independence, nothing was done to promote virtue. And this caused people to harbor all the hatred the built for each other in the book.
The moral minorities like Stephen who had made it his life’s work to reconcile the nation and build it from its mistakes were silenced. This was due to the fact that there were many people in the country who were too angry and were busy justifying their negative plans against people from the other side. Therefore, there was a general level of dissent and hatred and the problem was identified to be something relating to the other side. The only solution was to vent out old hatreds and cause pain and seek revenge.
Furthermore, the character of Simeon Habinza indicates that morality is more than just education and academics. He states that when there is evil and negativity and people stand by idle, they are “no better than” the perpetrators. This shows that education and morality are two different things. Morality must be put ahead of everything that we do as human beings and as a society. Therefore, we must strive to be better and work to improve ourselves regularly and across all timelines. This is the only way proper societies can be built and the best elements of society and humanity can be preserved.
In conclusion, this term paper identifies that being educated and having academic competencies does not make a person a better person. What makes a person better is to transcend the limits and the prejudices that exists and defining what is right and wrong in an objective sense in order to make the best ethical choices to preserve humanity and achieve the best results for all people. Murambai shows that people who were educated, living in a modern era of advanced science and technology made some abysmal choices because they were made to believe that the right thing to do was to kill their neighbor. This shows that morality and virtue is distinct and separate from education and modernity. Any evil act and inhumane act can be justified. There is the need for all people to set basic standards of right and wrong and pursue what is right. The moral minority must come out and speak for what is right in periods of rage and widespread negativity and destruction. That is the only way virtue can be established. Education is meaningless unless it is accompanied by an effort to seek virtue.
Works Cited
Diop, Bobacar Boris and Fiona McLaughlin. Murambai: The Book of Bones. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006. Print.
Harrison, Brigid. Power and Society: An Introduction to the Social Sciences. Mason, OH: Cengage, 2014. Print.
Keat, Russell and John Urry. Social Theory as Science (Routledge Revivals). New York: Routledge, 2016. Print.
Stanton, Andrea. Cultural Sociology of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa: An Encyclopedia. Thousand Oakes: SAGE Publication, 2016. Print.
Totten, Samuel. Advancing Genocide Studies: Personal Accounts and Insights from Scholars. New York: Transaction Publishing, 2014. Print.
