Chadian Cleric Explains Christianity, Church Status in Muslim-dominated Context

“Chadian Christians are generally descendants of the animists, and there are good relations between both groups,” Fr. Léandre, an ACN-sponsored student studying in France says in the September 16 interview.

He appeals to those who view animism with suspicion “to resist the temptation to try and break completely with the past” saying, “Many of the values of the animists are compatible with Christianity.”

As one of the ten countries that fall in the conflict-ridden Sahel region, a fertile ground for the proliferation of extremist groups, the Chadian Priest says, the North-Central African nation has not been spared from Islamisation, especially during the reign of the late Muammar Gaddafi of neighboring Libya.

“Before his death in 2011, they (radical Islamists) were building mosques all over the country, including in the Christian towns of the South,” he says and adds, “They were encouraging young Muslim men to marry Christian women in order to convert them and have children who would in turn become Muslims themselves.”

According to the Paris-based Cleric, though this phenomenon stopped after the fall of the Gaddafi regime in 2011, “in those places where Christians and Muslims live side by side, there is still pressure to convert to Islam.”

“On the other hand, it is very difficult for a Muslim to convert to Christianity, and those who do take this step are more often than not rejected by their families,” he says in the interview with ACN’s Thomas Oswald.

Commercial contracts in the landlocked country are often easier when one is a Muslim, he notes.

Fr. Léandre goes on to explain why Chad appears to be more stable compared to most of its neighbors in the Sahel region, including Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Sudan and Eritrea.

“We are governed by a president (Idriss Deby Itno) who is a fighter. He has ruled the country for 30 years now and has a powerful army,” he says in the interview, which the leadership of the Catholic pastoral aid organization shared with ACI Africa.

He adds, “The Chadian army, with the support of France, has been very aggressive and effective against terrorist groups such as Boko Haram, and it doesn’t hesitate to attack its enemies even beyond its frontiers.”

Regarding the threat of “outright jihadist terrorism” waged by groups like Boko Haram, Fr. Léandre says, the Chadian government “is combating them effectively within its own territory, with the support of the French army.

“Consequently, it is a much less present threat than in the other surrounding countries,” he adds.

He also notes that the ethnically diverse nation grapples with “ancestral and immemorial conflict between the Muslim pastoralists of the North and the Christian and animist peasant farmers of the South.”

The Chadian people, the Priest says, have generally succeeded in resolving the majority of recurrent conflicts, but cautions that “when politics comes into the picture, everything becomes much more complicated and these disputes degenerate into bloody clashes.”

“I myself was born far from my parents’ home village, since they had to flee on account of the war and so I am a child of the war, and it may well be war that eventually kills me,” he says.

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Cognizant of his past, Fr. Léandre observes, “Chadian people are very conscious of the latent potential for violence; it forms part of our education and our way of life.”

He explains, “When I arrived in Paris for my studies, I was invited to take a walk along the famous Champs Elysées but I declined, because it runs next to the presidential palace. In Chad you have to steer clear of the presidential palace because it is a very dangerous place, where the sentries will shoot at anything that moves.”

He recalls an incident of an Italian nun who accidentally drove around the perimeter wall of the presidential palace in N’Djamena and when she realized her mistake and reversed the car, “the sentries still opened fire, shattering her windscreen.”

“Fortunately, she had the presence of mind to duck, and so she survived the incident,” Fr. Léandre says.