Gaël Faye’s luminous debut novel is set in Burundi in the early 1990s, when political violence in that small country was both mirrored and overshadowed by the genocide of Tutsis in neighbouring Rwanda. Faye is a hip-hop artist and songwriter, born in Burundi to a French father and Rwandan mother. His move into fiction has been wildly successful, with Small Country winning the Goncourt youth prize in 2016 and becoming a bestseller in France.
We first meet the narrator, Gabriel, in a melancholic prologue, as a 33-year-old immigrant in contemporary France, celebrating his birthday alone in a bar and watching young refugees arriving in Europe on a large-screen television. He is simultaneously detached from and enmeshed in his past, unable to let go of memories of the place he fled as a child.
The main body of the novel centres on Gabriel’s childhood, which plays out in a cul-de-sac in a comfortable expat district of Burundi’s capital, Bujumbura. He lives with his French father, Rwandan Tutsi mother and little sister in a household staffed with local workers; it is his foreign father who explains to him the differences between Burundi’s and Rwanda’s ethnic groups – the Hutu, “short with wide noses”, the Tutsi, “tall and skinny with long noses”, and the diminutive Twa minority. This crude stereotyping, introduced to the region by Belgian colonists, has fuelled cycles of communal violence. Gabriel’s mother fled Rwanda after one such murderous eruption and has a conflicted relationship not only with her own past but with her children too; she describes Gabriel as a “white” or “French” boy and mocks his attempts to speak Kinyarwanda. The family live in a world where many of the bosses are still Belgian or French men who feel entitled to call their staff “baboons” and “chimpanzees”, and in return some local men see Gabriel’s mother as a “whore” who has sold herself for a French passport.
Faye captures the physical, social, sensual and political reality of Burundi as seen through the eyes of a boy who wants to maintain his innocence. Bujumbura is described beautifully, resembling a holiday resort huddled around Lake Tanganyika, with the misty blue hills hugging its horizon. It is an idyllic setting for childhood adventures – cruising downriver in a banana tree trunk, stealing mangoes from neighbouring orchards, sneaking cigarettes and beers in dark corners – with a soundtrack of torrential rain and soukous music. Sheltered by his parents from the division and violence around him, Gabriel is at first intrigued by the passions excited by the upcoming presidential elections. Their driver and cook support different parties and Gabriel watches as tension builds between them.
For Gabriel’s 11th birthday his parents organise a huge party and invite all the neighbours, who feast on crocodile fillets and dance late into the humid night while the remains of the animal fester at the bottom of the garden. This last scene of togetherness – colonisers and colonised, Hutus and Tutsis, children and adults – is disturbed by a thunderstorm that scatters them all. Burundi is described as a land prone to outbursts: storms, sudden earthquakes and treacly lava flows. Soon after Gabriel’s birthday, Bujumbura is shaken by a military coup, heralded by Wagner’s Götterdämmerung on the radio.
The local boys that Gabriel spends his days with struggle to chose a name for their gang, and in a charming scene they decide that, as one of the members of the US R&B group Boyz II Men looks Burundian, they will name themselves the Kinanira Boyz in his honour. Their funny pop culture references to Tupac Shakur and the Nike logo underline just how recent the Rwandan genocide was, and bring it into shockingly sharp focus. As an adolescent in London at that time, my concerns and cultural references were similar to those of the “boyz” in Bujumbura, who go on to encounter and perpetrate atrocious acts of violence.
The reader hears of the genocide through phone calls and the late-night ravings of Gabriel’s mother, when she returns from seeing a “mass grave, open to the skies”. Around 900,000 people were killed in Rwanda in just over three months in a methodical extermination.
Translated into English by Sarah Ardizzone, this is a book that demanded to be written, not only to mark the lives lost in Burundi and Rwanda, but also to show the way in which violence can take hold of a nation. With a light touch, Faye dramatises the terrible nostalgia of having lost not only a childhood but also a whole world to war. “Genocide is an oil slick,” he writes, “those who don’t drown in it are polluted for life.” It is a sentiment, along with many others in this short novel, that resonates deeply within me.
- Small Country by Gaël Faye (Hogarth, £12.99). To order a copy for £11.04, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
