“Kamanzi, our sub-chief, came to take away our children.” So begins a trail of misfortune that befalls the inhabitants of a small hillside village in Rwanda shortly before the second world war. The children are wanted to pick flowers for the colonists (the Bazungu). The people hide their children but the sub-chiefs, with their sunglasses, watches and shoes, lash the fathers and force them to work in the mines. The farmers neglect their own crops in order to grow beans to feed the miners; their cattle are confiscated. Misery follows misfortune until finally arrives the greatest catastrophe of all: the Ruzagayura famine. The villagers are unprepared, lacking both cattle and stores. They look to the sky in search of their god Kibogo’s rain, but the rain doesn’t fall, and when it eventually does come the ensuing storm sweeps the soil and crops away.
We are still only four pages in. This short, tightly drawn and fast-paced novel is the latest work to be published in Britain by Scholastique Mukasonga, whose previous books, both memoir and fiction, reckon with Rwanda’s tumultuous history. In Kibogo she explores themes of forgetting and remembrance, and the insidious legacy of Rwanda’s Christianisation.
