Our Lady of the Nile
SynopsisPlot
Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be moulded into respectable citizens, and to protect them from the dangers of the outside world. The young ladies are expected to learn, eat, and live together, presided over by the colonial white nuns. It is fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan and a quota permits only two Tutsi students for every twenty pupils. As Gloriosa, the school's Hutu queen bee, tries on her parents' preconceptions and prejudices, Veronica and Virginia, both Tutsis, are determined to find a place for themselves and their history. In the struggle for power and acceptance, the lycée is transformed into a microcosm of the country's mounting racial tensions and violence. During the interminable rainy season, everything slowly unfolds behind the school's closed doors: friendship, curiosity, fear, deceit, and persecution.
Story
About this book
Set in 1970s Rwanda, Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga takes place at a fictional girls' boarding school positioned high on a ridge near the source of the Nile. The school exists to shape its students into the country's future female elite, kept apart from the tensions building in the world below. Colonial white nuns oversee their education, and a racial quota allows only two Tutsi students for every twenty enrolled.
Gloriosa, the school's dominant Hutu student, begins to adopt the political prejudices of her parents, while Tutsi classmates Veronica and Virginia push back, searching for space to claim their own identity and history. The novel was originally published in French as Notre-Dame du Nil by Gallimard in 2012. Mukasonga, herself a Rwandan writer and genocide survivor, sets her story fifteen years before the 1994 genocide, using the enclosed school grounds and a long rainy season to compress the country's mounting ethnic divisions into a small, observable space.
Within the school walls, friendship, curiosity, fear, and persecution develop side by side. The boarding school operates as a contained version of the broader society, where political loyalty, ethnic identity, and personal ambition collide among students still forming their sense of the world.
