The title is taken from the name of the all-girls Catholic high school in Nyambinombe district at the center of the story. The school is named for the statue of the Virgin Mary erected at one of the sources of the river Nile, 2km away from the school.
This is a high school story set decades before the Rwanda genocide with all the usual genre themes of student cliques and rivalry, obsession with physical appearance, school crushes, envy, rumours, deceit, opportunism, and others. And for the most part, the students seem to be preoccupied with these teenage squabbles and infatuations. However, Mukasonga uses these aspects to create a microcosm representative of Rwanda at the time; portraying the bigotry and hatred that would eventually lead to the genocide two decades later. She uses the archetypical representations of the characters to theorize the origins of the conflict, inoculating the reader of the notion the genocide was an independent incident and inviting them to recognise the conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi was as old as the establishment of colonial rule and Christianity in Rwanda.
Mukasonga starts by deftly establishing the setting of the lychee, Our Lady of the Nile, to its surrounding neighbourhood. In these same chapters, she gives historical context around the school’s establishment and that of the statue. There is considerable praise for the school:
“There is no better lycee than Our Lady of the Nile. Nor is there any higher. Twenty-five hundred meters, the white teachers proclaim”
A reverence further increased by it being an elite school where the children of important politicians study. The school is surrounded by an impoverished village—a stark contrast to the “palace of impossible dreams”. It is also close to a source of the Nile. About themselves:
“We’re so close to heaven.”
This incessant praise builds the expectation of the decadence—which is mainly moral—whose slow rise Mukasonga subtly and even conspicuously weaves into the narrative. This adds to the microcosmic feel of the novel. The fall from grace is further depicted in the failures of Gloriosa, and her loss of power—a side effect when her father is overthrown.
However, “Our Lady of the Nile was a black woman, an African woman, a Rwandan woman …” which we learn later has the facial appearance of the Tutsi. This subjective observation forms the rising action of the novel when the archetypical villain, Gloriosa, a Hutu militant and daughter of the president, notes the Tutsi facial features and hatches a plan to deface the statue so it may be given the appearance of “the majority people”.
The narrator and the teachers note that the school’s task is to groom the students, elites of the nation, to secure prominent positions in the echelons of power but this does not speak to the individual intentions of the students most of whom are Hutu from high profile families. Some are aware of their purpose as pawns, to be used by their parents to further the latter’s careers. Others, especially the minority Tutsi, under the quota system, are there for a diploma with the hopes the education would protect them from violence. For these minority, they are the hope of their families.
The characters are archetypes of their socio-political and cultural backgrounds and rarely transcend these assigned roles. It feels as though each is meant to put across a political and social picture representative of similar people of the times. There’s Gloriosa, the Hutu president’s daughter. A militant and anarchist who riles others into violence against the Tutsi minority parroting her father’s and the party’s hate speech. Modesta the half Hutu, half Tutsi, who is conflicted about where she belongs and predictably wants the benefits of belonging to both sides and not the consequences. She chooses Hutu but in the end, suffers the fate of the Tutsi. Virginia, who comes closest to being the protagonist in the novel, bears the popularised picture of a Tutsi… In all these characters, Mukasonga gives a face to the generalisations of ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’.
Because of this, the characters come off as caricatures, artificial in a way, which is reinforced by the staged sense to their dialogue. In many incidences, they outright tell on themselves, as though aware someone else is listening in (probably the author meant this for non-Rwandan readers) and needs to know certain things moving forward:
“Listen, Virginia, there’s something I want to tell you. But don’t breathe a word to anyone.”
“You know we Tutsi never reveal our secrets, Veronica. We’re taught to keep our mouths shut.”
Another example is the encounter with Rubanga, a keeper of Royal secrets and stories, who goes on for a considerable amount of word-space explaining who he is (umwiru) and how he isn’t supposed to reveal secrets to Virginia. Eventually, he does. Mukasonga at these points comes off as lecturing the reader on important history. These massive information dumps are neon signs flashing IMPORTANT. MUST KNOW.
However, the success of this approach comes in the setting of a close to perfect microcosm with all the cultural, social, political, religious, and colonial background analogous to the whole country. The lycee of Our Lady of the Nile can thus be seen—in some aspects—like a miniature Rwanda before the 1994 genocide.
Mukasonga also succeeds in tracing the colonial origins of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict, the Western tendency of assigning labels, and differentiating peoples based on their ‘origins’ only to capitalise on these to divide the same. Mukasonga makes it clear that Hutu and Tutsi had intermarried and lived together long before the white man came to ‘discover’ the sources of the Nile. She discusses the West’s romanticism of royalty and culture and juxtaposes this to the deep respect Rwandans have for cows, their dead, and their cultural beliefs. She does this through the relationship between Veronica, a Tutsi, and Monsieur de Fontenaille, a European Coffee plantation owner who traced the origins of the Tutsi to Ethiopia and the Egyptian gods. He transfers his reverence to Veronica worshiping her as his Isis—a queen and goddess—while Virginia is elevated to the status of a Candace queen also to be worshipped. There is little mention of Hutu culture and history. Simply put, Tutsi, accepting a role assigned to them, were placed above Hutu. Virginia tells Veronica at the end of the chapter:
“…when the whites arrived, they thought we were dressed like savages. They sold glass beads, loads of pearls, and tons of white cloth to the women, the chiefs’ wives. They showed them how to wear it all and how to fix their hair. They turned them into Ethiopians, the Egyptians they’d come all this way to seek. Now they had their proof. They dressed them to fit their own delusions.”
Furthermore, the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the conflict is portrayed especially by the Mother Superior’s belief they were training the feminine elite who would become part of the social revolution. The Church’s role is clearer by one of the teachers and the School Chaplain.
“As a humble priest of the indigenous clergy,” the sexually abusive Father Hermenegilde, who would later encourage violence against Tutsi students, tells the girls and continues to brag that, “he himself had contributed, albeit modestly (though he was prepared to share this confidence with them that evening), to the social revolution that had abolished serfdom and drudgery. He may not have been a signatory to the 1957 Bahutu Manifesto, but had been one of its principal instigators (although he didn’t wish to boast): the ideas and demands laid out within it were his.”
The 1957 Bahutu Manifesto, a political document produced by Hutu intellectuals, called for the liberation of the Hutu from the colonialists and the race of oppressors, the Tutsi. This set the basis of the Social Revolution (referenced multiple times in the novel) which was a period of ethnic violence of Hutu against Tutsi that started on All Saint’s Day 1959 up to 1961. Mukasonga was three years old at the time and gives a vivid first-person account in her memoir Cockroaches (Archipelago Books, Translated by Jordan Stump)—the images of the terror forever etched into her memory. The uprising—Muyaga in Kinyarwanda, or Wind of Destruction—led to the transition of Rwanda from a feudal Tutsi-governed Belgian colony to an independent Hutu-dominated republic. However, the seeds had been planted further back by the German colonial policy of divide and rule. The pro-Tutsi and anti-Hutu policies were perpetuated when Belgium took over colonial governance. At the time, Tutsi power was deteriorating and there had been the rise of Hutu elites who, with support from the Roman Catholic Church, later called for the transfer of power to the Hutu. Belgian colonial government turned their backs on the Tutsi and supported the Hutu. And the Hutu had decades-long grievances.
The structure of the novel is sometimes disjointed, reading like a series of short stories loosely related by the characters and the common themes of hatred and bigotry. But this in some ways reflects the state of society at the time—the division of a people along ethnicity line, and personal trials, whose interaction took the form of violence of one against the other. This further reinforces Mukasonga’s novel as a representation of the times.
As a whole, the novel is easy on the eye, pleasurable, graceful in its narrative, and like her other translated works, rife with foreboding on each page. The characters are memorable and developed enough to drive the plot and message home. Mukasonga provides conflict that will keep the reader engaged but she is not too concerned about it. Her intentions are clear—she wants to show how things were. She is not overly concerned about the ending either. In the early pages she reveals it:
“The chiefs’ photos have suffered the social revolution,” said Gloriosa, laughing. “A dash of ink, a slash of the machete, that’s all it takes … and no more Tutsi.”
“What about the ones with a question mark?” Modesta wanted to know
“Alas, they must be the ones who managed to flee! But now they’re in Bujumbura or Kampala …”
It is assumed the reader knows about the 1994 Rwanda genocide. The ending of the novel is satisfying enough. The real satisfaction beyond flipping the last page, however, is the education (or for some, the slow unimposing realisation) that conflicts and tragedies have souls—real people—for whom a deep recognition and respect should be given beyond the generalisations of ‘victims of genocide’.
Our Lady of the Nile is published by Archipelago Books and translated from the French by Melanie Mauthner. You can a copy on Amazon.
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