Scholastique Mukasonga
Our Lady of the Nile
Translation: José Manuel Fajardo.
Lower case.
Barcelona, 2024.
226 pages
«I don’t want to continue in this country. Rwanda is the country of death,” reads the last page of Our Lady of the Nile, the novel that Scholastique Mukasonga has conceived to try to show how the genocide of 1994 came about. How many words will we need to understand what happened so that 800,000 people were murdered in 100 days? How cruel and unfair is it to say of a country that it is “the country of death”? Few are free from fear. War and revenge are inscribed, like compassion and sacrifice, in our condition. In The Iliad or the poem of strength, In one of her most lucid and disturbing writings, the French philosopher Simone Weil writes: «Romans and Hebrews both believed themselves removed from common human misery, (…) the Romans despised foreigners, enemies, the defeated, (and the Hebrews) saw in misfortune the sign of sin and therefore a legitimate reason for contempt. They considered their defeated enemies as horrible before God himself and condemned to atone for crimes, which allowed cruelty and even made it indispensable.
Born in 1956 in the Rwandan prefecture of Gikongoro, Mukasonga went into exile in Burundi in 1970, where she completed her studies. Since then, this Tutsi has lived in France. Our Lady of the Nile It is set in Rwanda in the 1970s, when the Hutu “social revolution” had triumphed: the overwhelming majority had prevailed after the independence of Belgium, which had strengthened racial differences and elevated the Tutsi minority after persuading it that it was predestined to govern. It is a novel that, knowing in advance what was going to happen in April 1994, takes the reader along a bitter and fascinating path of initiation while evoking fragments of Rwandan history. It offers a frieze of traditions, rituals and beliefs that reflects the cultural complexity of the country. The writer discards the Eurocentric prejudices that associate Africa with endemic tribal violence, as if the exacerbation of ethnic traits had not been used for the conquest, domination and exploitation of lands and beings.
Yes in Goodbye, Dr. Banda The British classicist Alexander Chula told the story of the Kamuzu Academy, a school to enhance Latin and Greek to train the best minds in Malawi, the Hutu power created the Our Lady of the Nile high school so that the wealthiest families could educate the future good Christian wives of the ruling classes of Rwanda. The famed institution, run by nuns but with only two Rwandan teachers, was not exempt from the ethnic tensions that have torn the tiny nation nestled in the Great Lakes.
Mukasonga displays an admirable narrative pulse with credible characters – the Tutsis Veronica and Virginia; the Hutus Gloriosa and Godelieve; Father Herménégilde or Sister Gertrude, the Mother Superior, among others – and a plot in which lies and the manipulation of history serve so that in this microcosm apparently safe from the vices and intrigues of Kigali, the distant capital, the seeds are sown for the genocide to triumph. A devastating novel.
