David Chapman in conversation with Fidele Mutwarasibo
Dr Fidele Mutwarasibo is a Senior Lecturer in Work Based Learning at the Open University and is much in demand in the public life of the city of Milton Keynes. I know him personally through our membership of the (ecumenical) Church of Christ the Cornerstone, and was aware that he has been through life experiences far removed from anything I have had to deal with. His experiences, to my way of thinking, give him the authority to speak of things which are purely theoretical for the rest of us. Specifically, he has been exposed to extreme violence and I wanted to understand how he emerged from this with what seems like remarkably little bitterness and a lot of wisdom and generosity.
Fidele was born in Rwanda and was there at the time of the genocide. The details are too painful for him to recount, but during the ‘100 days of madness’ he faced many near-death experiences, and he escaped to Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a place which itself is now in the news for all the wrong reasons. After a year in Goma he migrated to the Republic of Ireland where he studied for his PhD and was active both in the life of the Church and the community. He was not afraid to speak out on difficult issues such as racism in Irish society, which even led to online death-threats. After 19 years in Ireland he moved to Milton Keynes to work at the Open University.
I especially wanted to understand how, given his experiences, he retained what seems to me to be a remarkably positive outlook, and he talked about hope: hope in situations where hope is unrealistic. Hope means that you appreciate where you are, but recognise that nothing is at a standstill.
You can envision a better tomorrow, which can sometimes be unrealistic, but you can envision a situation where all these things will go away
Or maybe you can’t even envision it, but you continue to hope for it.
You are in a desperate situation but the fact that you don’t see how to get out of these predicaments does not mean you have to say “OK all life is lost”. The situation may look atrocious… but if I survive, if I get the chance to get out, this is what I might do
If you have hope that things can change it might help you identify the part you might play to make the situation different tomorrow.
What resources do I have? When I talk about resources, I am not only talking about money. I am talking about your friends. I am talking about people who might open doors which look otherwise locked.</blockquote>
I know from what Fidele has said before that when the trouble came some of his ‘friends’, Westerners with resources and routes to escape, melted away and offered no help. Yet he was not bitter.
What I’ve learned, and this is also hope, is to think maybe this is happening but I may get the chance to go and tell them they abandoned me. That will give me some sort of spirit … because you are saying there is a lesson to be learned here, and I have to go and tell these people, and say, in my hour of need where were you? But if you are already a victim you are not going to be able to say it. The hope is that you may be able to go and, not confront, not fight, but tell them to their face, by the way you abandoned me
I wanted to press him, though, on how he could avoid bitterness. His response was in terms of understanding and empathy and he asked me: “If there was a bomb that explodes. What would you do?”. “Run away” I said.
Yes, you try to escape. Maybe there is someone sitting beside you but you will not have thought “what have I done, have I forgotten someone”. So I wouldn’t blame them. People are trying to save themselves. It is potentially only afterwards, once the dust has settled, when you start saying, I wish, I wish, I wish. They should have done more but based on the circumstances, on the choices they had to make, they were probably traumatised
Another OU academic that I admire was born to a Jewish family in France in 1930. His parents were murdered in the holocaust and he was hidden in Free France until coming to the UK at the end of the war. He once told me that one thing he learned in therapy was that ‘regret’ is the most useless of emotions. I mentioned this to Fidele, and he strongly agreed:
I have an analogy because I am always thinking positively, that my glass is half full not half empty. I say that my vehicle does not have a reverse gear. You can’t change the past. The present you may have some influence on but certainly the future you can change. Being stuck in the past trauma you can have a situation where your descendants, people how have never experienced what you have experienced, get intergenerational trauma. You can have children who can never meet their grandparents, never meet their biological cousins. You have go where you are, create a new family – you can call them a surrogate family. If you want to survive I think you have to press the reset button</blockquote>
But returning to Fidele’s Western friends who abandoned him, had they not previously claimed the moral high ground, preaching about loving your neighbour? The American journalist and Presbyterian minister Chris Hedges has argued that one of the terrible fallacies of the West (especially the atheist West) is a narrative of moral progress due to the enlightenment: that alongside technological progress has come moral progress. For Fidele:
The whole idea of having moral superiority or otherwise is something which I take with a pinch of salt. I think we have good people in each and every society. If we are looking for moral high ground I look to my ancestors, many of whom did not have the benefit of Western education that I did. I would say their morals were much better than mine because they grew up in a society with the worldview called Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is based on the premise that ‘I am because we are’ and ‘we are because I am’. If you practice it I cannot think of a better philosophy of life. It’s just like we Christians talk about loving your neighbours yourself and obviously on paper it’s great, but in practice is difficult. But I learnt a lot from my ancestors when I was growing up, and I’m just now giving them justice by writing about Ubuntu. I have two book chapters out, I have two more coming and I’m probably going to do more about it because they inspire me – as opposed to me inspiring them with my enlightenment. So if the enlightenment in this case promotes individualism, it is this individualism which makes people forget about their friends and everyone else, and just save themselves. It is as if the world starts and ends with you. In some societies we eat too much, for example, and there are people would be delighted to go to our bins and take what we throw out, whereas in collective societies people will not eat if there are people outside who are hungry. So are we going to bring our civilizations to the world when we are obviously destroying the environment and we are behind many of the world conflicts? Or then if we are talking about the boats crossing the channel we need to look at the causes and effects. We need to ask why are people so desperate to come here, not withstanding the weather, not withstanding how they may be received and the people who are going to be antagonistic? Why, why, why? Maybe then we will say, are we informed? Are we buying resources from those places, minerals, oil or otherwise? Are we paying the fair price for the things we import from there? Are we? And then we can ask them why they are coming here. But maybe they will tell us “you gave the dictator the arms to come and bomb me and now I’m coming to hide in your place here”.
I suggest it is about the explanatory narratives that dominate the national discourse. Who determines the dominant stories? Fidele noted that history is always written by the winners, and specifically the male winners. Maybe women would tell the story differently. But we have to be careful when talking about a moral compass and the enlightenment – whatever that means.
We have had many civilizations. If you go back in history, wherever we are, the Romans and their empire, we can go to Egypt and the empires, we can go to the Incas in Latin America, we can go to Timbuctu, where they set up universities and libraries long before we started talking about it. Those civilisations didn’t survive long enough to come here and tell us they have a high moral compass. But there are things we can learn from one another and that’s what I try to do. I try to learn from ‘the enlightenment’ and draw from my own background, my cultural heritage, because I think there is a lot of good things I can take from one or the other.
To finish the interview we talked more specifically about resistance, and about fighting back against injustice. Fidele was aware that I have been on street protests and rallies, but it is not something he does.
I have been an activist for so many years, but my activism is certainly different from other people’s activism. Although I support people who go in protests, I don’t go on protests myself. That’s not because I don’t think they have their place, it is just that I tend to be a pragmatist. I want to go and talk to people and try to convince them through a moral argument. I have seen my approach work. I’ve seen it work where we’ve got some changes which have never been fundamental, but they’ve been subtle. But sometimes over time, the subtleties become something big.
And what about the role of violence in resistance?
Some people will advocate it and the irony is that somebody’s terrorist is a freedom fighter for somebody else. And you have to define what violence is and I think that the definition of violence itself is up for debate. A fundament point is that by and large people who engage in violence make their political point do so because they feel they have exhausted all the other tools they could have used. In political science they call it infrapolitics and is normally what people will do when they don’t think there is any alternative. For me as a political strategy I don’t do violence and I don’t do protests. I tend to have an approach whereby I try to win people over by making the argument, getting some case studies if necessary and using some statistics. I know sometimes I need people outside shouting in order to make my point, and there is complementarity, but if violence is going to create more division, it’s unlikely to have a better outcome. Protest, people protesting and exercising their political right, although I don’t join in, is not something I see a difficulty with. But property damage does something else.
I pressed Fidele on the activities of Palestine Action in spraying paint on warplanes and smashing the windows of arms manufacturers. Was that justified?
I think it’s the cause which I have an opinion on. People should not be forced to go to that level. Something should happen to prevent people feeling the only way they’ll be heard is to go and spray paint on aircraft or break windows. We shouldn’t get to that and if everything is working as it should, people get their hearing. Unfortunately when it becomes violent people are going to be entrenched in their position. If you are polarized everyone will think they are right, and so who is right?
I started by wanting to understand how Fidele remains so positive and not bitter, after all of that he has been through and how he has been treated. It might sound trite, but he has managed to hold on to who he is and his values throughout. He has never become defined by his circumstances or by those who want to do him harm or undermine him. He has never had the mentality of a victim. And perhaps most of all he holds on to the worldview of Ubuntu.
Ubuntu. I am because we are. We are because I am.
Ubuntu gained prominence through South African leaders’ words and practices in the post-Apartheid era. According to Bhengu (1996, 10), Ubuntu is the “art of being a human being”. Mbiti (1992, 2) suggests that “to be human is to belong to the whole community, and to do so involves participating in the beliefs, ceremonies, rituals and festivals of that community”. Desmond Tutu (1999, 34-35) offers an explanation of Ubuntu in the following words: “Ubuntu … speaks to the very essence of being human. […] We belong in a bundle of life. We say ‘a person is a person through other people’ […] I am human because I belong, I participate, and I share. A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, [and] does not feel threatened that others are able and good; for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes with knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are”.
Taken from: Fidele Mutwarasibo, 2024.
Mutwarasibo, F. (2024). Ubuntu Virtues as a Coping Mechanism in the Face of Racism and Discrimination. In: Chitando, E., Okyere-Manu, B., Chirongoma, S., Dube, M.W. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Ubuntu, Inequality and Sustainable Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-69573-5_32