By Eloge Willy Kaneza
Late Sunday afternoon on May 17, beneath the soft spring light falling over the stone pathways and green lawns of the University of Notre Dame, applause continued to echo long after the university’s 181st commencement ceremony had officially ended.
Graduates in dark academic gowns embraced their families near the Golden Dome. Priests, professors, diplomats, humanitarian workers, and students slowly crossed the historic Catholic campus after one of the most prestigious commencement ceremonies in the United States.
And seated quietly after hours of celebration was Marguerite Barankitse — known across Africa simply as “Maggy” — a woman whose life has become inseparable from the history of survival, exile, reconciliation, and moral resistance in the African Great Lakes region.
Moments earlier, Notre Dame had awarded her an honorary doctorate, recognizing more than three decades of humanitarian work through Maison Shalom, the organization she founded after surviving Burundi’s massacres in 1993.
But when she sat down for an exclusive interview with Amjambo Africa, Barankitse spoke little about honors. Instead, she returned again and again to one word: fear — and why humanity must overcome it.
“Don’t ever be afraid,” she said softly. “Love will never have the final defeat. Hatred will never have the final victory.”
At Notre Dame, Barankitse was honored alongside internationally respected figures including Eamon Duffy, Mary Cunningham Boyce, Christopher J. Murphy III, J. Christopher Reyes, and Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin. The commencement address was delivered by Sister Raffaella Petrini.
Yet throughout the weekend, Barankitse’s presence carried a rare emotional gravity. For many students and guests, she was not simply a humanitarian receiving recognition, but a moral voice shaped by genocide, exile, forgiveness, and radical compassion.
“Why does God choose a small woman from Ruyigi?”
Dressed in honorary academic regalia, Barankitse appeared visibly emotional throughout the ceremony. “This is not a doctorate I earned by spending years studying,” she told Amjambo Africa. “But Notre Dame has given me this title today.”
It is the eighth honorary doctorate she has received internationally. Yet she spoke less like a global figure than someone still trying to make sense of her own calling. “Why does God choose a small woman from Ruyigi?” she asked quietly. “I was the only African woman there.”
Ruyigi, her hometown in eastern Burundi near the Tanzanian border, remains one of the country’s poorest regions.
During commencement weekend, Ugandan Catholic theologian and Notre Dame Professor Emmanuel Katongole reflected on that reality through a biblical lens. “For those who know Ruyigi,” he said, “can anything good come out of Ruyigi?” The phrase echoed Nathanael’s question in the Gospel of John before encountering Jesus.
Katongole and the “revolution of love”
Katongole first encountered Barankitse in an unexpected way nearly two decades ago. At the time, one of his superiors had met her in Rome, where she had been invited to address bishops at a Vatican-related gathering during the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI. He was then urged to invite her to a peace and conflict conference.
Curious, Katongole searched her name online. “What I found,” he recalled with a smile, “was ‘a crazy woman.’” The room laughed.
But, he added, that description quickly became misleading. What he discovered instead was a life that refused to surrender to hatred. Since then, he said, he too had become “contaminated by her craziness.”
Barankitse embraced the label without hesitation. “As Aristotle said, to change the world, you need a grain of madness,” she told Amjambo Africa. “It is a beautiful madness — a madness of love, of audacity, of resisting hatred while still remaining fully human.”
Katongole has since become one of the leading interpreters of her moral and spiritual legacy. In the 2025 authorized biography Love Made Me an Inventor: The Story of Maggy Barankitse, for which he wrote the foreword, he presents her life as a “revolution of love.”
Rather than portraying Barankitse simply as a humanitarian figure, Katongole describes her as a witness to another way of rebuilding societies after violence — one rooted not in revenge, but in compassion, imagination, and radical human dignity.
The massacres that changed everything
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The origins of that “madness of love” lie in Burundi’s darkest historical moment.
In October 1993, after the assassination of Burundi’s first democratically elected Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, massacres erupted across the country between Hutu and Tutsi communities. Hutu militias killed thousands of Tutsis in several regions — violence some Tutsi rights defenders describe as genocide. Reprisals followed after the army, then Tutsi-dominated, intervened.
A Tutsi herself, Barankitse attempted to hide dozens of Hutu neighbors and children in Ruyigi, even after losing around 60 members of her extended family in the violence. In the aftermath of that tragedy, what emerged was Maison Shalom — an organization that grew from an emergency response into a long-term humanitarian mission providing education, health care, psychosocial support, economic assistance, and shelter to tens of thousands of vulnerable children and families across Burundi, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Yet she rejects ethnic simplifications. “You are afraid to say Hutu and Tutsi,” she told Amjambo Africa. “But we must dare to say these things.”
For her, the root cause was not ethnicity but manipulation. “It was not the Hutu who killed my family,” she said. “It was a system. Bad governance. Manipulation.”
Exile under Nkurunziza and the collapse of protection
In 2015, after publicly criticizing political repression during the crisis surrounding President Pierre Nkurunziza’s controversial third term, Barankitse was forced into exile in Rwanda.
That period, she says, marked a turning point in Burundi’s postwar trajectory — one in which fear, repression, and shrinking civic space deepened dramatically. Independent voices, journalists, and human rights defenders were increasingly targeted, and organizations were weakened or dismantled.
She was later sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment, in proceedings widely criticized by rights groups as politically motivated. Her nationality was revoked, her property was confiscated, and the bank accounts of Maison Shalom were frozen or dismantled in Burundi.
“They took everything from me in Burundi,” she said. “But I am not a depressive woman.” When asked directly how she endures it, she responded without hesitation: “When you look at me, do you see a depressed woman?” Instead, she describes what remains as “holy anger” — a moral force that refuses despair.
Refugees and “Mahama City”
From exile in Rwanda, Barankitse rebuilt Maison Shalom inside Mahama Refugee Camp, home to tens of thousands of Burundian and Congolese refugees. But she rejects the word “camp.” “I call it Mahama City,” she said.
There, Maison Shalom has grown into a full ecosystem: schools, libraries, gardens, sports fields, trauma counseling, and vocational training in carpentry, mechanics, tailoring, digital skills, and entrepreneurship.
“This is the proof,” she said, “that refugees are not a burden. They are a treasure when you invest in their dreams.”
Refugees, immigrants, and the Mediterranean
Barankitse spoke forcefully about global migration crises, including the thousands dying each year in the Mediterranean Sea. “People are dying in the Mediterranean,” she said. “And we are looking away.” For her, restrictive immigration policies and rising xenophobia represent a deeper moral crisis.
Visa restrictions and a personal experience of exclusion
Barankitse also spoke about her own recent experience with visa restrictions while traveling internationally, including to the United States. She described it not as a technical delay, but as part of a broader pattern of suspicion and exclusion faced by many Africans and humanitarian workers. “I know something about rejection,” she said. “I was refused a visa.”
For her, such experiences connect directly to the same logic that governs global migration politics: fear of the other. It is, she said, the same logic that fuels borders becoming barriers rather than bridges. “This earth belongs to all of us,” she said. “God created it for brothers and sisters — not exclusion.”
Einstein, vaccines, and human progress
“If America rejected immigrants,” Barankitse added, “this country would be empty.”
She pointed to the contributions of migrants and refugees in science, medicine, and technology — from global intellectual breakthroughs to public health innovations. Barankitse cited Albert Einstein, who was forced into exile and reshaped modern physics, as an example of how displacement has transformed humanity. She also referred to immigrant scientists and researchers behind major vaccine breakthroughs and global medical advances.
“Everyone comes from somewhere,” she said. “No one owns knowledge. No one owns the earth.”
Illness, vocation, celibacy, and the four popes
Few people know that Barankitse recently survived cancer. She spent months in Belgium undergoing treatment while continuing her humanitarian work.
At 69 — and preparing to turn 70 in July — she speaks openly, often humorously, about life, fragility, and vocation. “I answered a vocation,” she said. “Love never gets old.”
Asked about her lifelong decision not to marry, she smiled. “It is a choice of vocation,” she said. “But if one day God changes His mind and I invite you to my wedding, don’t be surprised.”
Her spirituality remains inseparable from her activism. Over the years, she has met four popes — John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis, and Leo XIV — each encounter reinforcing her conviction that faith must translate into protection for the poor, displaced, and forgotten. “I am inspired by the Gospel,” she said. “If I were not a Christian, perhaps I would only have fear.”
“Are you special?”
When asked whether she considers herself a special person, she paused and smiled gently. “I am not special,” she said. “I am just a woman who said yes.”
A call from exile: Ligue Iteka and the U.S. State Department
Among those following her recognition was Anschaire Nikoyagize, president of Ligue Iteka, Burundi’s oldest human rights organization. Although he did not attend the ceremony, he spoke to Amjambo Africa by phone from exile. “Whether people recognize it or not, Maggy is an honor for the whole [of] Burundi,” he said.
Ligue Iteka has long been a key source for international human rights reporting on Burundi, including references by the U.S. State Department in its annual human rights assessments. Nikoyagize’s words underscored both Barankitse’s symbolic weight and the continued exile of many Burundian rights defenders.
“You must overcome fear.”
At Notre Dame’s Institute for Social Concerns Senior Send-Off, Barankitse offered a blessing to graduating students.
Her message was simple: “You must overcome fear,” she said. “There is too much fear everywhere.” For her, fear is the foundation of hatred — and overcoming it is the beginning of moral courage.
“Africa is beautiful”
Toward the end of the interview, her tone softened. “I am proud to be an African mother,” she said.
Then she smiled: “O Africa, how beautiful you are.”
“Don’t be afraid.”
As commencement weekend came to an end, Barankitse returned once more to the word that has defined her life since 1993: fear, and how to overcome it.
Asked what still gives her hope in a fractured world, she answered without hesitation: “Love.”
Then she repeated the message she carries from Burundi to refugee camps, from Vatican halls to American universities: “Don’t be afraid. Love has already overcome hatred.”
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the early June 2026 print edition of Amjambo Africa.
