Noise and Silence in Rwanda’s Postgenocide Religious Soundscape

Abstract

This article explores conflicts around noise and silence in Rwanda’s postgenocide religious soundscape. After the genocide, new Pentecostal (or abarokore) churches grew rapidly in the country and offered up noise and a specific understanding of praise and worship music (guhimbaza Imana) as important ways to enact healing. However, Catholics emphasised silence and viewed the new Pentecostal churches as distracting interlopers. Far from being trivial differences, I argue that these conflicts around sound hint at wider divides in Rwandan society and a worrying new convergence between religious and ethnic identity. Focusing on aural conflicts between Christian denominations can therefore help us gain a better sense of the limits of Pentecostal conversion. Instead of assuming that Pentecostals are necessarily ‘noisy’, I suggest we pay closer attention to the ways in which they may also cultivate silence, and how this relates to wider power structures.

negotiating the sounds of born-again christianity: aesthetic provocations in western ethiopia

“…It is for this reason, I think, that approaching the dynamics described in this article as "conflicts, " "battles, " or "clashes" (De Witte 2008;Oosterbaan 2009;Grant 2018) will fail to capture their political and religious significance. What it will obscure is the fact that being born-again is always a continuous project of "pushing back" against other aesthetic regimes, Christian or otherwise.…”

Christians’ Tolerance of Muslims’ Religious Sounds in Tana Toraja

“…The contrast between Muslim and Christian worship traditions of noise and silence in Tana Toraja points out the potential for religious intolerance, as seen in Rwanda. The case in Rwanda demonstrates intolerance due to the contrast between silence and noise in worship between the Pentecostal Church community and the Catholic community (Grant, 2018). However, this potential can be reduced, according to G.J.…”

“…Previous publications have prioritized conceptual analysis (Setyabudi, 2020), social interactions (Marpuah, 2019), and the construction of places of worship (Pamungkas, 2014). Meanwhile, research on the sound of houses of worship has only focused on political issues, legal and regulatory issues (Grant, 2018;Kovačič, 2016b;Moosa, 2021), conflict-related issues, and conflict resolution strategies (Kovačič, 2016a;Tamimi Arab, 2015). Therefore, more research is still needed on religious noise and how it relates to the tolerance of majority adherents towards minority religious adherents.…”