Fraternity, Martyrdom and Peace in Burundi: The Forty Servants of God of Buta

During Burundi\u27s 1993-2005 civil war, students at Buta Minor Seminary were ordered at gunpoint to separate by ethnicity—Hutus over here, Tutsis over there! They chose instead to join hands and affirm their common identity as children of God. The forty students killed were quickly proclaimed martyrs of fraternity. Their costly solidarity defused the cry for reprisals and continues to inspire Burundians and others on the path of reconciliation. Drawing on fifty interviews with survivors, parents of martyrs, neighbors, religious leaders and other Burundian intellectuals, this essay examines how Burundian Catholics understand the significance of the Buta martyrdom to their country and the world. The Buta seminarians\u27 sacrificial witness to fraternity demonstrates the effectiveness of enculturated African Catholicism in mobilizing youth to resist genocidal manipulation and transform its legacy of division and trauma. In its resistance to political violence, the Buta testimony also re-aligns traditional warrior virtues with a nonviolent masculinity rooted in fraternal love rather than aggression. This passage from politicized aggression to fraternal love is of particular interest in light of Francis\u27 2020 encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, and its call for the rebirth of a universal aspiration to fraternity. The ongoing story of the Buta martyrdom also contributes to contextualized understandings of violence and its transformation in contemporary Africa. The precarious vulnerability of the young Buta martyrs emerges as a virtue in their story, suggesting that the perennial fragility of peace in Burundi is not necessarily a handicap in transforming cycles of violence, but perhaps a resource

Reimagining Violence in Contemporary Africa: Catholic Martyrdom and the Ethics of Sacrificial Solidarity in Burundi

This article discusses the enculturated Catholic ethics of martyrdom embodied by the Martyrs of Fraternity of Burundi, a group of students whose cause is now before the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints for refusing to separate into Hutus and Tutsis during Burundi’s 1993–2005 civil war. Engaging Fratelli Tutti from a local African perspective, it considers how the conviction that all human beings are brothers and sisters is to find concrete embodiment. Its argument develops Emmanuel Katongole’s assertion that the African church provides a living witness of what hope looks like in contexts of violence and war, drawing on Burundian scholarship and more than sixty interviews conducted in Burundi from 2018 to 2024 to develop a thick narrative of fraternal martyrdom and the ethics of Ubuntu. By placing sacrificial solidarity rather than violence at the center of the story of the Martyrs of Fraternity, Burundian Catholics reimagine their civil war in ethical terms. This Burundian embodiment of an ethics of sacrificial solidarity, solidly grounded in its original cultural substratum, stands as a resource for a world increasingly engulfed by war, refusing to let violence have the last word in a story of fraternal love hallowed by sacrifice