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

“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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