Healing through Remembering

This educational handbook displays grassroots experiences of peace, reconciliation, and healing in the Great Lakes region of Africa, in which Burundian, Congolese, and Rwandan authors share their understandings and practices of Memory Work. They committed to do so in a joint Participatory Action Research Team together with German facilitators. The team members ‘opened their archives’ on the traumatizing effects of the severe conflicts that each of these countries experienced. Their learnings and findings from this research process are collected in this book, which aims to resolve remaining tensions resulting from past experiences. Displaying a variety of strategies that lead to a Healing of Memories, it is high time to integrate such discourses into a mainly Western-European-centered scientific community. In this way, the book aims to fill the academic void regarding the German-colonial legacy of violence in the three neighboring countries, which was fueled under colonial rule. As such, this book is central to current discourses on the decolonization of science in terms of authorship, research ethics, and methods. The Editors Karin Elinor Sauer, Dr. rer. soc., Dipl.-Päd., Professor of Social Work Theory and Social Work Methods at DHBW Villingen-Schwenningen. Dieter Brandes, Rev. Dr. theol. at the Facultatea de Teologie “Sfântul Andrei Saguna” in Sibiu-Romania. Penine Uwimbabazi, Prof. Dr., Vice Chancellor of the Protestant Institute of Arts and Social Sciences (PIASS), Huye. Onésime Nzambimana, general secretary at Université des Grands Lacs (UGL), Goma. Mumbere Ndemo Mbasa, Prof. Dr., permanent professor at the Université Libre des Pays des Grands Lacs-Goma (ULPGL).