When Europe began colonizing Rwanda in the late nineteenth century, the Anglican Church played a significant and long-lasting role in controlling the colony through the Ruanda Mission. This informative volume shows how the church repeatedly aligned with the regime in power and failed to take account of its own history in fomenting ethnic tensions prior to the 1994 genocide. In recent years, the media has depicted Rwanda as a model of unity, development, and recovery, yet Phillip A. Cantrell II argues that not all is as it seems, as he takes a critical look at the church's complicity with authoritarian rule—from the Tutsi monarchy to the Rwandan Patriotic Front.

Drawing from new archival materials as well as on-the-ground field research, Revival and Reconciliation is a Rwanda-centered account of the country's ecclesiastical and national historiography. Cantrell calls attention to the harms the postgenocide church risks doing should it continue to support false narratives about Rwanda's colonial and postcolonial past—with dangerous consequences for the future.

Phillip A. Cantrell II is an associate professor of world and African history at Longwood University. His main research area is East Central Africa during the colonial period.

Contents
Preface 

Introduction
1 False Narratives of a Disputed Past: Precolonial Rwanda
2 History Intervenes: Colonialism, Christianity, and the Ruanda Mission  
3 Growth, Revival, and Conflict: The Anglican Church through World War II
4 The Unravelling: The Ruanda Mission and Independence
5 Revival and Reconciliation: The Anglican Church in Post-genocide Rwanda
Conclusions: History Faces the Present 

Notes  
Bibliography
Index