Our Lady of the Nile
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By Scholastique Mukasonga
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Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be moulded into respectable citizens, and to protect them from the dangers of the outside world. The young ladies are expected to learn, eat, and live together, presided over by the colonial white nuns.
It is fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide and a quota permits only two Tutsi students for every twenty pupils. As Gloriosa, the school’s Hutu queen bee, tries on her parents’ preconceptions and prejudices, Veronica and Virginia, both Tutsis, are determined to find a place for themselves and their history. In the struggle for power and acceptance, the lycée is transformed into a microcosm of the country’s mounting racial tensions and violence. During the interminable rainy season, everything slowly unfolds behind the school’s closed doors: friendship, curiosity, fear, deceit, and persecution.
Our Lady of the Nile is a landmark novel about a country divided and a society hurtling towards horror. In gorgeous and devastating prose, Mukasonga captures the dreams, ambitions and prejudices of young women growing up as their country falls apart.
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Set in Rwanda in a girls boarding school circa 1980 this sometimes funny, sometimes tense story of prejudice among the pupils and staff at the school reflects the prejudice in real life Rwanda that led to the 1984 genocide. It's not a happy book and I sometimes found it a bit strange and disjointed but it was an interesting read nevertheless and made all the more poignant by knowing of the author's own experience.
