Our Lady of the Nile

by Scholastique Mukasonga

  “So,” concluded Mother Superior, “these are young men who didn’t want to do their military service; they’re antimilitarists, possibly conscientious objectors, or Jehovah’s Witnesses – that’s all we need! It doesn’t bode well. And you know what happened in France, Father Herménégilde, not so long ago: students in the streets, strikes, demonstrations, riots, barricades, revolution! We’ll have to keep an eye on these gentlemen, monitor what they say in class, so they don’t spread subversion and atheism in our pupils’ minds.”

  “There isn’t much we can do about it,” replied Father Herménégilde. “If they’re sending us these Frenchmen, it’s a matter of politics and diplomacy. Surely our small country needs to build broader relationships. After all, there’s more than just Belgium …”

  The first two Frenchmen were delivered to the lycée by a car from their embassy, which reassured Mother Superior to a certain extent. Naturally, they wore no ties, and one of them, rather worryingly, had a guitar among his belongings, but they seemed reasonably polite, shy, and slightly dazed to find themselves suddenly transplanted to these remote mountains in a country they’d never heard of in farthest Africa. “Monsieur Lapointe insisted on coming here under his own steam,” explained the Cultural Attaché a little vaguely. “He should arrive before nightfall or tomorrow at the very latest.”

  The third Frenchman did indeed arrive the next morning, in the back of a Toyota. He kindly helped the women with babies on their backs to climb out. The lycée guards pulled the ever-vocal gates wide open for him, as if greeting an official vehicle. It was the second lesson of the day, and the girls, or at least those sitting closest to the windows, saw a very tall, very skinny young man striding across the courtyard, dressed in jeans that had lost all their color, and a short-sleeved khaki shirt that hung open across his hairy chest. His only luggage was a backpack decorated with numerous patches. But what really startled those girls who were lucky enough to see him, making them squeal with surprise, causing all the others to jump up and rush to the windows, in spite of their teachers’ protests, was his hair, his thick, blond, wavy hair, which hung halfway down his back.

  “Well, it must be a girl,” Godelive said.

  “Not at all, you saw very well from the front, it’s a man,” argued Frida.

  “He’s a hippie,” Immaculée explained. “The young people in America are all like that now.”

  Sister Gertrude ran to warn Mother Superior:

  “Mon Dieu! The Frenchman, Mother, he’s here!”

  “Well, what about the Frenchman? Show him in.”

  “Oh, mon Dieu, Reverend Mother! The Frenchman, wait till you see him!”

  Mother Superior had the greatest difficulty suppressing a gasp of horror when the new teacher entered her study.

  “I’m Olivier Lapointe,” said the Frenchman nonchalantly. “I’ve been posted here. This is the lycée of Our Lady of the Nile, right?”

  Stunned with indignation, Mother Superior was lost for words, and in order to gather her senses, she turned to Sister Gertrude:

  “Sister Gertrude, please show Monsieur to his lodgings.”

  Kanyarushatsi (Mr. Hair), as the girls called him, remained closeted in his bungalow for two weeks. They told him they were putting the finishing touches to the timetable. Nearly every day, a delegation sent by Mother Superior – Father Herménégilde, Sister Gertrude, Sister Lydwine, the Belgian teachers, the two other Frenchmen, and, finally, Mother Superior herself – attempted, on the pretext of a courtesy visit, to persuade him to get a haircut. Mr. Hair was prepared to cede on every other issue: wear a shirt and tie, and decent trousers. But when it came to his long hair, he was quite intransigent. They suggested he cut it to at least shoulder length. He refused point-blank. Never would he let a single hair be touched. His long locks were his one pride, the masterpiece of his youth, his whole reason for living, and he wouldn’t give it up for anything in the world.

  Mother Superior bombarded the ministry with desperate letters. The French teacher’s shamefully long hair was a threat to every moral, both civic and Christian, and imperiled the future of Rwanda’s female elite. The Minister wrote an embarrassed letter to the French ambassador and his cultural Attaché, who returned to the lycée and threatened Mr. Hair. In vain. Despite the close surveillance placed on his bungalow, the lycée girls came and hovered around it. Whenever there was a sunny spell, he was often seen drying his long, golden curls outside after a shampoo. Some girls even dared to gesture and call to him from afar: “Kanyarushatsi! Kanyarushatsi!” The lycée staff eventually lost heart and allowed him into the classroom. They needed a math teacher. Yet the pupils were very disappointed with his performance. In class, he never budged from his equations. He was actually quite similar to Monsieur Van der Putten, except that when he turned around to write on the blackboard, the girls gazed, enraptured, at his long flowing mane. When Kanyarushatsi left the room at the end of class, the most shameless of the seniors swarmed about him and, under the pretext of asking him questions about elements they hadn’t understood, tried to touch his hair. He answered as quickly as he could, without daring to look at the cluster of insistent young women jostling him. He finally managed to extricate himself from this pack of purportedly curious girls, striding off down the hallway to escape them.

  At the end of the year he was sent back to France. “We were mere tenth graders then,” said a regretful Immaculée, “but if he were still around, I’d know just how to tame him now.”

  “They haven’t touched a thing, again,” bemoaned Sister Bénigne, assigned to the kitchen to help old Sister Kizito, whose hands trembled and who needed two canes to walk. “The dishes come back half eaten. Are they scared I’ll poison them? Do they take me for a poisoner? I’d really like to know who put that into their heads! Is it because I’m from Gisaka?”

  “Don’t you worry now,” said Sister Kizito in a reassuring voice. “You’ll see, Gisaka or no Gisaka, this time next week their suitcases will be empty, and whether they like your cooking or not, they’ll be forced to eat it. They’ll lick the plates clean.”

  Before returning their daughters to school, the girls’ mothers had indeed filled their suitcases with the most delectable food a Rwandan mother could imagine and prepare.

  “They make them eat nothing but white people’s food at the lycée,” they’d say. “Unfit for Rwandans, especially young women – some say it could make them infertile.”

  So suitcases became well-stocked pantries filled by doting mothers: beans and cassava paste, with a special sauce, in little enameled containers decorated with large flowers and wrapped in a piece of cloth; bananas slowly baked overnight; ibisheke, sugarcane you chew and chew until the pure fibrous marrow fills your mouth with its sweet juice; red gahungezi sweet potatoes; corncobs; peanuts; and even, for the city girls, doughnuts of every color under the sun – a secret Swahili recipe – avocados you can only buy at Kigali markets, and extra-salty, red-roasted peanuts.

  At night, as soon as the monitor had left the dorm, the feast began. The suitcases were opened, and all the victuals laid out on the beds. One of the girls would check that the monitor was fast asleep, but some of the monitors, like Sister Rita, weren’t fools and were quite willing to be corrupted in order to join the banquet. An assessment was made of everyone’s provisions, and it was decided what should be eaten first, before the evening’s menu was planned. Any selfish, greedy girl who tried to keep a little of her pantry for herself, and deprive the communal banquet, was roundly condemned.

  Alas! The supplies soon ran out, and after two or three weeks there was nothing left but a few handfuls of peanuts reserved for emergency consolation on really bad days. The girls would have to resign themselves to eating whatever was served in the refectory: tasteless bulgur; a yellow paste, with the sonorous name “polenta,” that stuck to the palate and that Father Angelo – a regular guest from the neighboring mission – wolfed down with relish; soft little oily fish out of cans; and sometimes, on Sunday
s and holidays, meat from who knows what sort of animal called corned beef …

  “Everything the whites eat,” moaned Godelive, “comes out of cans, even the sliced mango and pineapple swimming in syrup, and the only real bananas they serve us are the sweet bananas at the end of the meal, but that’s not how you eat bananas. As soon as I get home for vacation, me and my mother will prepare real bananas. We’ll oversee the kitchen hand as he peels and cooks them, in water with tomatoes. Then my mother and I will add everything else: onions, palm oil, very mild irengarenga spinach, quite bitter isogi leaves, and small dried ndagala fish. It’ll be a real feast, with my mother and sisters.”

  “You don’t know anything,” Gloriosa said. “What you need is peanut sauce, ikinyiga, and then cook slowly, really slowly, so that the sauce infuses right to the heart of the bananas.”

  “But if you cook with Butane gas and a saucepan like they do in the city,” Modesta butted in, “the bananas will cook too fast, and they won’t be soft and creamy. You need to use a clay pot and charcoal. It takes a very long time. I’ll give you the real recipe, it’s my mother’s. First of all, you mustn’t peel the bananas. You put a little water in a big pot, then lay the bananas on top, nice and tight, and cover them with a thick layer of banana leaves; it must be airtight, so use leaves that aren’t torn. Then weigh them down with a shard of pottery. Now wait, a long time. It’s got to cook nice and slow, but if you’re patient you’ll get lovely white bananas, soft and creamy all the way through. And you have to eat them with some ikivuguto buttermilk, and invite your neighbors.”

  “My poor Modesta,” said Goretti, “your mother is always so fussy, with her lovely white immaculate bananas, served with milk! You always take after your mother. I’ll tell you what to make for your father: dark red bananas that have soaked up the bean juice. I’m sure your mother wouldn’t touch them, but when the houseboy prepares some for your father, you’ll be obliged to try them. Teach your mother the recipe: she must peel them, and then, when the beans are almost done but the pot’s still half full of water, throw them in the pot so they absorb all the remaining liquid. The bananas will turn red, brown even, that’s what makes them thick and succulent! Bananas for true Rwandans who’ve got the strength to wield a hoe!”

  “You’re all city girls,” said Virginia, “or from rich families. You’ve never eaten bananas in the fields. That’s where they’re at their best! Often when we’re working in the fields and we don’t have time to go home, we’ll light a little fire and grill a couple of bananas, not in the flames of course, but in the red-hot embers. Yet there’s something even better: when I was a little girl, my mother would sometimes give me and my girlfriends a few bananas. We’d head into the fields after the sorghum harvest and dig a small hole, then light a fire in the hole with dried banana leaves. After it died down, we’d remove the embers, but the hole would still be glowing red. So we’d line it with a fresh green banana leaf, place the bananas in the hole and cover them with the hot earth. Then you just put a banana leaf on top and sprinkle it with a little water. When the leaf is fairly dry, you open up the hole. The banana skins look like a soldier’s camouflage gear, and the inside is so tender, it just melts in your mouth! I don’t think I’ve ever eaten bananas so tasty.”

  “So what did you come to the lycée for?” asked Gloriosa. “You should have stayed in the sticks munching bananas in the fields. You would have made room for a real Rwandan from the majority people.”

  “Sure, I’m from the country and I’m not ashamed of it, but I am ashamed of what I just said and of what we’ve all been saying. Do Rwandans ever talk about what they eat? It’s shameful to talk about that. It’s shameful even to eat in front of others, to open your mouth in front of someone, yet that’s what we all do here every day!”

  “It’s true,” said Immaculée. “Whites have no modesty. I hear them when my father invites them over to talk business. He’s got no choice. The whites never stop talking about what they eat, what they have eaten, and what they will eat.”

  “And the Zairians,” Goretti said, looking at Frida, “they eat termites, crickets, snakes, and monkeys, and they’re proud of it!”

  “They’ll be ringing soon for the refectory,” said Gloriosa. “Come along. And you, Virginia, you’ll have no choice but to open your mouth in front of us and eat up the leftovers of real Rwandan girls.”

  Rain

  The rain fell on the lycée of Our Lady of the Nile. How many days and weeks had it been? Everyone had stopped counting. Mountains and clouds were but a single grumbling chaos, as if on the first or last day of the world. The rain streamed down the face of Our Lady of the Nile, washing off her black mask. The supposed source of the Nile flooded over the edge of the basin in a raging torrent. Passersby on the path – in Rwanda there are always passersby on the path, though you never know where they’re coming from or where they’re going – took shelter beneath giant banana leaves that the thin film of water changed into green mirrors.

  For many long months, rain becomes the Sovereign of Rwanda, a far greater ruler than the former King or the current President. Her coming is eagerly awaited and entreated. Famine or plenty, it’s Rain who will decide. Rain, the good omen of a fertile marriage. First rains, at the end of the dry season, making children dance as they turn their faces skyward to receive the fat drops for which they’ve longed. Shameless rain, revealing the budding curves of all young women beneath their drenched wraparounds. Violent, capricious, punctilious Mistress, pitter-pattering on every sheet-metal roof, on those sheltering in the banana groves or in the muddy neighborhoods of the capital. She who casts her net over the lake, and diminishes the volcanoes’ hugeness; she who reigns over the vast forests of the Congo, the very guts of Africa. Rain, endless Rain, unto the ocean that bore her.

  “Maybe it rains like this the world over,” said Modesta, “maybe it will just keep on raining and never stop, maybe it’s Noah’s flood all over again.”

  “Just imagine, girls,” said Gloriosa, “if it was the flood, we’d soon be the only ones left on Earth, the lycée’s way too high up to drown, it’d be like the Ark. We’d be alone on Earth.”

  “And when the water ebbs away – because it’s bound to one day – it’d be up to us to repopulate the earth. But how will we manage if there are no boys left?” Frida said. “The white teachers would have left ages ago to drown back home, and I for one won’t have Brother Auxile or Father Herménégilde.”

  “C’mon,” said Virginia. “The flood’s an abapadri tale. Where I come from, up on my hill, we abandon the fields as soon as it rains and gather around the fire. Vacation time. No need to fetch water, because we make banana-leaf gutters to catch the rain. We can shower and do our washing at home. We spend our time roasting corn as we roast our feet. But be careful, if the cob bursts and the kernels fly, that attracts lightning. And my mother says: ‘Don’t laugh, those who show their teeth, especially those with red gums, they’ll bring on lightning.’ ”

  “And we have the abavubyi in Rwanda, the rainmakers,” said Veronica. “They’re the ones who control the rain, making her start or stop. But perhaps they’ve forgotten how to make her stop. Or else they’re taking revenge on the missionaries who make fun of them and denounce them to the district authorities.”

  “And do you believe in those abavubyi?”

  “I’m not sure, but I know one, an old woman. I went to see her with Immaculée, she lives nearby.”

  “Tell us.”

  “One Sunday after Mass, Immaculée told me: ‘I want to go see Kagabo, the healer. You know, the one who sells strange medicines at the market. I’m a little scared to go see him alone. Want to come along?’ Of course I was ready to accompany Immaculée; I was curious to see what she was up to with that witch doctor the Sisters call the devil’s henchman. You know Kagabo, you see him at the market, right at the end of the row of women selling peas and firewood. A little apart, but no one bothers him; the district police officers don’t go anywhere near
him, and his customers prefer no one notice them. He lays out his wares in front of him on a piece of matting; they’re pretty scary looking. I know that some people will ask me what the point is of those oddly shaped roots and all those herbs and dried leaves and the little shells that come from far away, from the sea, as well as glass beads like the necklaces our grandmothers used to wear, the skins of serval cats, snake skins and lizard skins, small hoes, arrowheads, little bells, copper-wire bracelets, powder in banana-bark packets, and who knows what else. I don’t think he has many clients. The ones who are seeking out Kagabo only pretend they’ve come to buy something; for more complicated matters, they make appointments to see him at his home, wherever that is, to heal themselves with his little jars of Nile water, to cast a spell, or be freed from one, and for even more serious things.

  “We walked up to Kagabo, trembling a little. Immaculée was too afraid to address him. He eventually spotted us and beckoned. ‘What can I do for you, my belles demoiselles?’ Quickly, Immaculée whispered: ‘I need your help, Kagabo. You see, the thing is, I’ve got a suitor, in the capital. I’m scared he’ll chase after other girls, that he’ll dump me. Give me something to keep my sweetheart, so he has eyes only for me, so he doesn’t see any other girls, so there’s only one girl for him in all the world. I don’t want to see another girl on his motorbike.’ Kagabo answered: ‘I deal with sickness, I’m a healer, love problems don’t concern me. But I know someone who can help you out, and that’s Nyamirongi, the rainmaker. She’s doesn’t just deal with clouds. Give me a hundred francs and I’ll take you to see her next Sunday; you can bring your friend along, but she’ll have to pay a hundred francs too. Come when the market packs up and we’ll go to Nyamirongi’s.’