Reviews with content warning for Racism - Our Lady of the Nile

A group of teenage girls in an elite catholic lyceum installed by the Belgian colonial regime in Rwanda try to juggle their aim to become Rwandese elite, just being teenage girls and the complicated racial and tribal tensions some 15 years before the height of the Rwanda genocide.
I enjoyed the narrative trick of each of the girls and their teachers representing a different fraction of the historically built conflict and learning about Rwandan history without it taking the center stage. The characters could have some more depth though, I would have loved a longer book or less characters.

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curatoriallyyours's review

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challenging tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

Our Lady of the Nile is an elite Catholic boarding school for girls in Rwanda. In this story, set 15 years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the tension between Hutu and Tutsi students is palpable and reflects the general state of things in the country. What I really liked about this book was the social commentary that the author quietly inserted via the opinions of characters. She shows the conditions that led to the genocide, including Belgian involvement in Rwanda, as a slow buildup to the final events of the book. The numerous narrators and some of the odd storylines didn’t work for me. My edition of the book also had some muddled up pages towards the end, which didn’t help! Over all, I’m glad I read this book.

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sherbertwells's review

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dark emotional tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

“Our Lady of the Nile was black: her face was black, her hands were black, her feet were black. Our Lady of the Nile was a black woman, an African woman, a Rwandan woman—and indeed, why not?” (11)

This book is Dark Academia.

OK, I know Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga didn’t write Our Lady of the Nile with Donna Tartt or ~the aesthetic~ in mind. She sought to expose the colonialism, sexism and ethnic tensions that led to the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. But that doesn’t mean her work should be excluded from the lists of the best Dark Academia books, or overlooked by potential readers. It has all the elements of a DA classic:

An über-privileged setting? The titular school is a is a prestigious Belgian Catholic lycée at the source of the Nile river, built to educate the Rwandan elite: “the young ladies of Our Lady of the Nile know just home much they are worth” (8).

Dark themes, including murder? The novel is set in the relatively-peaceful 1970s, but beneath the alpine calm of the lycée lurk ethnic tensions that will explode to the surface twenty years later. As friendships fray and a student tries to mobilize her Hutu classmates against Virginia and Veronica, two Tutsi girls in the senior class, what once seemed unthinkable becomes inevitable.

Ancient civilizations and forbidden knowledge? Eccentric French academic Monsieur de Fontenaille believes Virginia and Veronica are the reincarnations of legendary African queens. His crumbling colonial estate provides a refuge for the girls, but is he merely deluded or a dangerous predator? A visit to a lonely umwiru—condemned as pagan by the nuns who run the school—only fuels Virginia’s confusion.

“I did what I needed to do. But I also learned that Tutsi aren’t humans: here, we’re inyenzi, cockroaches, snakes, rodents; to whites, we’re the heroes of their legends” (165)

Homoerotic tension? Well, I guess it doesn’t have everything. But Our Lady of the Nile features several complicated female friendships, which in DA are rare and precious curiosities.

If this book weren’t published by a small press (Archipelago Books) and set in a foreign country (Rwanda) it would be the darling of the Dark Academia readership. Not only that, it’s an actual good book. Except for Gloriosa, who is more of a symbol than a character, all of the girls are developed and sympathetic. The atmosphere is glorious, thick with curiosity, dread and mountain rain. The translation by Melanie Mauthner is clean and pretty. And the ending, while a little impersonal, is told with a shocking plainness that made me squirm in my seat.

Our Lady of the Nile isn’t one of my favorite books, but it’s quite good. There’s a film adaptation directed by Mukasonga herself and Atiq Rahimi, and I wish I could watch it somehow. If you want to learn more about Rwandan history or just read a great work of Dark Academia, you will probably enjoy it too.

“There was the photo of the administrator making his military salute before the statue, and the soldier behind him dipping the Belgian flag. There were photos of the intore dancers—slightly blurred because the inept photographer tried to capture their impressive leaps in midair, which caused their sisal manes and leopard skins to be wreathed in a ghostly halo. Then there was the photo of the chiefs and their wives in all their finery, but most of these dignitaries had been crossed through with a wide stroke of red ink, and the faces of others masked by a question mark in black.

‘The chiefs’ photos have suffered the social revolution,’ said Gloriosa, laughing. ‘A dash of ink, a slash of machete, that’s all it takes’” (14)

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