SET ABOUT TWENTY years before the genocidal catastrophes of 1994 and published not quite twenty years after them, Our Lady of the Nile is set in a Rwandan Catholic girls' school established not long before independence for the daughters of the native elite. The Mother Superior and most of the teachers are European and almost all of the students are Hutu, but in a bow towards democratic inclusion, each class includes two Tutsi girls as well. The two in the final year class, Veronica and Virginia, are earmarked for destruction by Gloriosa, daughter of a government minister and self-appointed queen of the final year class.
Most of the novel is a deft, often charming, often funny satire along the lines of Mary McCarthy's Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood, but Gloriosa's glowering presence keeps the reader mindful that things could get very, very dark, and in the closing chapters they do.
Virginia and Veronica, alert all along to Gloriosa's hostility, have made contrasting provisions against disaster. Veronica plans to rely on the protection of local French planter de Fontenaille, whose deeply peculiar fetishization of the Tutsi has led him to promise Veronica he will take her to Europe and make her a star. Virginia, on the other hand, has noticed that de Fontenaille's property contains the desecrated grave of an ancient queen, whose spirit Virginia placates through an elaborate traditional ceremony.
I won't reveal how that works out, but I sure hope you wouldn't expect a colonizer with Gobineau-ian racial theories to be a better bet than an ancient African queen.
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