Our Lady of the Nile: A Novel Paperback – September 16, 2014 by Scholastique Mukasonga (Author), Melanie Mauthner (Translator) (Archipelago )

Welcome to Our Lady of the Nile, an exclusive lycée for the daughters of the elite, high in the mountains of Rwanda, close to the spring that is the source of the White Nile. Run by white Catholic nuns, its pupils are nonetheless all black, and almost all of one race: the majority people, the Hutu. Though a token few belong to the other race, the Tutsi, whose different coloring and elegant appearance suggest an origin from an ancient people further to the north. The novel is set in the later seventies, about fifteen years after the Hutu had taken power at the country's independence in 1962, and fifteen years before the Rwanda Genocide of 1994, in which militant Hutus would attempt to eliminate the Tutsi once and for all. Poised in time between the two events, isolated on its mountain top, we have this elite enclave for girls who mimic the attitudes of their parents without fully understanding them.

Unfortunately, it takes a very long time for these issues to come to the fore. Beautifully printed in a squarish format from Archipelago Press, and smoothly translated (from the French) by Melanie Mauthner, the first half of the book might be a school story almost anywhere. The pupils all have Christian names to replace their African ones, as though they were already little nuns: Gloriosa, Immaculée, Modesta, and the two Tutsis, Veronica and Virginia. At first, it is hard to tell them apart. One is just aware of a commonplace texture of small excitements, cliques, and girlish jealousies. And a few reminders of the horrors of Catholic education back in the day: the nuns' attitude to menstruation as a monthly reminder of the inherent sinfulness of women, the priest's little "rewards" that he would save for the prettiest girls in private. So far, a three-star book at best.

But as we become more aware of the different status of the Tutsi girls, things begin to change. Virginia and Veronica attract the attentions of a half-crazy but rich local landowner, who believes they are the queens of a lost Egyptian civilization. Gloriosa, the most outspoken of the Hutu girls and a born rabble-rouser, has different ideas, and what begins as an almost symbolic schoolgirl prank suddenly turns serious, with horrific results. Then and only then, as the novel takes on overtones of LORD OF THE FLIES, does it move up into four-star territory.