Mennonite Mission Network, along with many partners in Africa, Europe and North America, helped conceive Le Centre Formation à la Justice et à la Paix (CFJP, Justice and Peace Training Center) and has invested in nurturing this partnership. Fifteen theological schools and institutions have launched an accredited master’s degree in conflict transformation for the French-speaking world. The degree program is offered mostly online and is informed by Anabaptist theology. One of the students, Nathan Mudiji Makumbi, describes how he plans to use his training to dismantle ancient ethnic tensions between the Bantu and Batwa peoples of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
I enrolled in Le Centre Formation à la Justice et à la Paix (CFJP, Justice and Peace Training Center) master’s in conflict transformation program, to equip myself to better serve God. I also want to learn to help my Batwa (an Indigenous people group) brothers and sisters, who are considered less than human by the dominant Bantu people groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
[Editor’s note: The Batwa people were Indigenous hunter-gathers in much of central Africa. The Bantu people began to migrate into the area in about 4000 B.C.E. and gradually displaced the Batwa people to the edges of their settlements.
