“Kamanzi, our sub-chief, came to take away our children.” So begins a trail of misfortune that befalls the inhabitants of a small hillside village in Rwanda shortly before the second world war. The children are wanted to pick flowers for the colonists (the Bazungu). The people hide their children but the sub-chiefs, with their sunglasses, watches and shoes, lash the fathers and force them to work in the mines. The farmers neglect their own crops in order to grow beans to feed the miners; their cattle are confiscated. Misery follows misfortune until finally arrives the greatest catastrophe of all: the Ruzagayura famine. The villagers are unprepared, lacking both cattle and stores. They look to the sky in search of their god Kibogo’s rain, but the rain doesn’t fall, and when it eventually does come the ensuing storm sweeps the soil and crops away.
We are still only four pages in. This short, tightly drawn and fast-paced novel is the latest work to be published in Britain by Scholastique Mukasonga, whose previous books, both memoir and fiction, reckon with Rwanda’s tumultuous history. In Kibogo she explores themes of forgetting and remembrance, and the insidious legacy of Rwanda’s Christianisation.
The story is told in four parts. In Ruzagayura, the villagers, beset by famine, turn back to the old ways, remembering how their king and the rainmakers took charge of making rain come. Four old men try to recall the legend of Kibogo, but argue over the details. Their efforts to find someone who might know more leads them to a female sage, Mukamwezi, who claims to be the bride of Kibogo. Mukamwezi once belonged to the royal court. When the king was deposed by Belgian colonists she went to live alone, eschewing all suitors. She agrees to conduct a ceremony to appeal to Kibogo to bring the rain.
Meanwhile, further down the hillside, the Catholic priest, referred to as “padri”, is planning to appeal to the Almighty for rain by way of a procession bearing a statue of the Virgin Mary to the hilltop. When rain does indeed come, the padri takes the credit. He pronounces the four old men infidels. Over the following year three die, and, despite the padri’s objections, the supposedly Christian villagers erect ancestor shrines in their memory.
Some time later, Akayezu – “small Jesus” – arrives: a young and none too bright seminarian, dressed in white robes, who is nearly trampled when he attempts to feed the hungry villagers with two loaves of bread. When he is seen apparently to resurrect a child, he gains a following of women and falls foul of the church authorities. Gradually, his challenges to the padri grow bolder: “The idea preyed on his mind: Tell me, then, why the padri’s book never talks about black people and why it says nothing about us Rwandans? Did Yezu not know any blacks?” And: “Akayezu was certain it wasn’t the story of the Jews the Bible told, nor even of Yezu, but of the Rwandans.”
Akayezu decides to evangelise Mukamwezi, but instead falls under her influence as she reminds him of the stories he grew up listening to at his mother’s feet: “Who will you believe? What the padri says or what your mother relates after dark? And you women, who will you believe: what they taught you in Catechism or what the spirit of Kibogo has revealed to me?”
In colonised African nations, African clerics began to recontextualise the stories of the scriptures for political reasons: to win followers and as an act of resistance to the colonial authorities. Thus, Mukamwezi, with Akayezu by her side, retells the story of the Resurrection with Kibogo as the central figure. Mukamwezi declares Akayezu the emissary who will recall Kibogo and become the next mwami (king): “You shall drive out the padri and all the Bazungu.”
In sentences replete with a sly humour, superbly translated into English by Mark Polizzotti, Mukasonga recounts how over the coming years, the villagers encounter a host of visitors, each with their own agenda. There is an agronomist who is dismissive of their practice of intercropping, and insists they plant their crops in single fields of straight rows. “These poor peasants didn’t even know, as they did, how to plant in tight, straight lines.” There are soccer scouts, NGO workers, more missionaries, whose team of young enthusiasts fell the sacred grove to erect a statue of the Virgin Mary. There is an anthropologist whose sole interest lies in stories of human sacrifice, which the villagers cheerfully fabricate. They also tell him the story of Mukamwezi and Akayezu, which by now has entered legend. This is pure gold for the anthropologist, who realises – in a literary homage perhaps to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart – that, once published, the legend will make his career. He talks of turning the shrine into a tourist destination, of re-enacting the marriage of Kibogo to a virgin bride. Meanwhile, Gasana, teller of the story, boasts that his version will be written down and thereby outlast all others.
The undulating rhythms of oral storytelling are blended into what is, in fact, a carefully structured novel. All four parts overlap, retelling the same tale from different times and perspectives. Thus, Kibogo pays tribute to the power of the oral tradition, whose endurance derives from its elasticity and adaptability. As the storytellers of the village begin to weave together the legends of Kibogo and Akayezu, Mukasonga writes: “And sometimes a little girl, forgotten at the storyteller’s feet, who refused to go to sleep like the others, stored away in her memory, without really understanding them, the enchanted words of the fable.” To read Kibogo is to enter the enchantment of this delightful and provocative miniature masterpiece.
• Kibogo by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Mark Polizzotti, is published by Daunt. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
