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In the aftermath, Rwanda's criminal justice system was overwhelmed. More than 100,000 genocidaires were crammed into 19 prisons. At first, Rwanda attempted to place the accused on trial. But during one two-year period, more genocidaires died of disease in prison than were tried. Also, Rwanda's execution of 22 genocidaires by firing squad in public triggered international outrage. Critics said the executions would only bring about more ethnic reprisal. In the meantime, the number of Rwandans on death row continued climbing. Rwandans who sought some measure of justice were caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

A short time after the genocide, Desmond Tutu, then the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, visited Rwanda and publicly called for mercy for the genocidaires. He championed restorative justice as a "third way" between so-called victor's justice that harshly punishes the guilty and the temptation of national amnesia.

Tutu's suggestion offered Rwandan Christians a third way. It is a way reaching into their cultural past as well as stepping into an uncertain future. In 1999, the Rwandan government, realizing that it was impossible to bring so many killers to a Western-style trial, revived Gacaca, the precolonial court system. It's named after the grassy area where village elders would gather to settle disputes. The Gacaca system supplements the nation's other courts and the U.N. genocide tribunal (headquartered in Tanzania). Gacaca is perhaps the largest modern-day experiment in using community courts to determine the fate of genocidal felons.

In some aspects, Gacaca echoes the methods of Tutu's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, put into place after black-majority rule was implemented in South Africa. That panel had the legal authority to grant full amnesty, provided officials and other individuals admitted guilt and sought forgiveness.

Tutu's conceptual framework for justice and reconciliation, spelled out in his influential book, No Future Without Forgiveness, is African and scriptural. South Africa's Zulus have a proverb: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu ("A person is a person through persons"). Tutu uses the word ubuntu ("compassionate human interaction") and other African cultural concepts to develop a theology in which personhood is anchored in community. "A self-sufficient human being is subhuman," the now-retired Tutu writes in a related book, Reconciliation. "God has made us so that we will need each other. We are made for a delicate network of interdependence."

Meg Guillebaud, a British missionary who trains Rwandan clergy, echoes that theme. "In the old days, no individual was ever considered to have committed an offense. It was regarded as being committed by the whole family." The families of an offender and a victim would assemble before village elders to determine the facts as well as restitution.

For minor crimes, one family would extend imbabazi, the word in Kinyarwandan (the indigenous language of Rwanda) for mercy. It literally means "a place where you would receive all the love and care a mother would give." In more serious offenses, mercy was not feasible and relations between families would be severed.

Guillebaud-author of Rwanda: The Land that God Forgot?-said Western missionaries usually emphasize individual guilt and the individual's need to repent. As a result, the Rwandan family-based means for restoring relationships was lost. "Hebrew thought forms are much more like Africans' in their stress on family responsibility," she says. The narrative of Joshua 7-the stoning of Achan, his family, and possessions for theft-provides Western Christians a point of reference for better understanding the African cultural context.

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April 2004, Vol. 48, No. 4