Our Lady of the Nile is a girls’ boarding school high in the hills of Rwanda, very near the spring that is the source of the Nile; there is a plaque announcing its “discovery” (“Cock Mission, 1924”), and a statue of the Virgin Mary, or possibly the ancient goddess Isis, erected by a Belgian bishop in 1953.
In the 1980s the school is run by French nuns to educate the daughters of Rwanda’s elite, training them “not simply to be good wives and mothers, but also good citizens and good Christians … to spearhead women’s advancement”.
National tensions are rarely explicitly addressed in the business of school life, but a sinister dynamic unnerves the reader from early on with the arrival of Gloriosa, who “stepped out of a black Mercedes with tinted windows, preceded by her mother”. The mother has to rush back to the city for dinner with the Belgian ambassador, but “Gloriosa announced that she would stand with Sister Gertrude at the gate, beneath the national flag, to greet the other seniors and let them know that the first meeting of the committee she chaired would take place the following day”. Gloriosa’s rival Goretti “also made a grand entrance, perched on the back of a huge military vehicle whose six thick tyres took the spectators’ breath away”, alongside soldiers in camouflage fatigues. Against the background of landscape description and a playful postcolonial history of the school, these two cars are enough for us to understand that something darker lies beneath the comic accounts of adolescence that follow.
The girls, given unfamiliar food by a French cook, bicker over treats brought from home for midnight feasts: “Beans and cassava paste, with a special sauce … bananas slowly baked overnight … red gahungezi sweet potatoes; corncobs; peanuts; and even, for the city girls, doughnuts of every colour under the sun.” They take walks in the long rainy season, compare their growing bodies, tease and boast about boyfriends, make fun of “Mr Hair”, a young French maths teacher on voluntary service overseas. They are, perhaps, more realistic about their own future prospects than their teachers are: “We were already fine merchandise,” says Immaculée, “and a diploma will inflate our worth even more.”
For a while, the spats between girls who take the convent ideology seriously and those who regard the routines of study and prayer as an inconvenience seem as serious as those between the daughters of Hutu “majority people” and the two girls who constitute the required quota of Tutsis. These two, Veronica and Virginia, take to sneaking off into the forest to visit the Parisian Monsieur de Fontenaille, who in youth “set off for Africa to seek his fortune” and is now a kind of heart of whiteness, Conrad’s Kurtz replayed as farce. Monsieur de Fontenaille has developed an obsession with painting the portraits of Tutsi girls, convinced that he alone can restore to the Tutsis the ancestral memory of their heritage in “the empire of black pharaohs”. He wants to paint Veronica as the goddess Isis and Virginia as Queen Candace, apparently believing them to be descendants or even reincarnations of the ancient rulers of his fantasies. “I don’t think he even sees the same landscape as we do,” says Veronica. “It’s like a movie playing in his head, but now he wants flesh-and-blood actresses, and that’s us.” He drugs the girls, not primarily to assault them but to dress them in the costumes and masks of his pharaonic/Tutsi myth of origin. Veronica knows perfectly well what’s going on, but the money she finds in her bra is useful.
This post-colonial satire is the background to Virginia and Veronica’s more acute danger, which comes from Gloriosa, the society waiting to believe her lies and the thugs at her father’s command. The ending is violent, bleak and wholly believable.
Melanie Mauthner has made a perfectly pitched translation of the original French, which is eerily laconic, both comedy and tragedy hauntingly understated. The novel reminded me Magda Szabó’s brilliant Abigail, another school story for grownups that is also a book about our inability or refusal to protect children from history.
• Sarah Moss’s Summerwater is published by Granta. Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Melanie Mauthner, is published by Daunt (£9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
The headline of this article was amended on 12 March 2021 to better reflect the view of the writer.
