Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga review – prelude to violence

This debut novel by French-Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga, originally published in 2012 and the first of her books to be published in the UK, could have been called Privilege and Prejudice. Translated by Melanie Mauthner, it is a school story like no other, set in the late 1970s in a lycée nestled in the mountains of Rwanda, near the source of the Nile (“‘We’re so close to heaven,’ whispers Mother Superior, clasping her hands together”), where the pupils, daughters of the rich, are taught a little of God and a lot about how to maintain the status quo.

The school is notionally a part of the government’s efforts to promote female education in Rwanda, but within limits: the lycée is a white intrusion in Africa, built under the direction of “white overseers who did nothing but look at large sheets of paper they unrolled like bolts of cloth from the Pakistani shop, and who went crazy with rage when they called the black foremen over, as if they were breathing fire”. The girls are to be the drivers of change, while strictly following rules: they must speak French – Swahili is forbidden – and are taught that “History meant Europe, and Geography, Africa. Africa had no history… it was the Europeans who had discovered Africa and dragged it into history.”

The ethnic conflict is at first handled comically and satirically

The novel focuses on different girls, their stories individual but linked, flashing like the scales of a fish. They have big personalities, forged from their privileged start in life, with Gloriosa the biggest of all – adept in the ways of ruling the world, of manipulating others: “It’s not lies, it’s politics,” she says, when she pretends to have been attacked by the militia to get out of trouble for an escapade (“I’m sure they wanted to rape us, probably even kill us”).

Our Lady of the Nile is driven by tensions. Sometimes these are funny, as when the girls argue over the best recipe for bananas – one-upmanship worthy of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch – or when teachers battle pupils over posters of pop culture figures such as Brigitte Bardot and Johnny Hallyday. “Satan,” the school chaplain warns, “takes every available guise.”

But bubbling under, then boiling over, is the ethnic division between Hutu and Tutsi, which in 1994 led to the slaughter of more than half a million Tutsi in three months. Mukasonga, a Tutsi, was exiled from Rwanda before settling in France in 1992; 37 members of her family were killed in the genocide. It’s little wonder that her early books focus on this, but the wonder of Our Lady of the Nile is in its bright, light touch.

The ethnic conflict is at first handled comically – Gloriosa, a Hutu, wants to destroy the nose of the school’s statue of the Virgin Mary because her white features make her look like a Tutsi – and satirically: the girls are taught that in the school, “it’s as if you’re no longer Hutu or Tutsi [but] what the Belgians used to refer to as civilised”. But ancient hatreds don’t lie down: the two Tutsi girls in the lycée, Virginia and Veronica, are “our quota”, says Gloriosa, among the “real Rwandan girls”.

The drama that ends the book, when the threat to “de-Tutsify our schools” is realised, is a foreshock of violence to come. We hear the rumble of what Mukasonga in her memoir, Cockroaches, calls “the machinery of the genocide”. Thanks to Mukasonga, who has been tipped for the Nobel prize in literature for her ability to make art from bearing witness, we are hearing its echoes still.

• Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Melanie Mauthner, is published by Daunt (£9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply