Kibogo

A new masterwork of satire, lore, and living memory from the leading voice of French-Rwandan literature. In four beautifully woven parts, Mukasonga spins a marvellous recounting of the clash between ancient Rwandan beliefs and the missionaries determined to replace them with European Christianity. When a rogue priest is defrocked for fusing the gospels with the martyrdom of Kibogo, a fierce clash of cults ensues. Swirling with the heady smell of wet earth and flashes of acerbic humour, Mukasonga brings to life the vital mythologies that imbue the Rwandan spirit. In doing so, she gives us a tale of disarming simplicity and profound universal truth. Kibogo's story is reserved for the evening's end, when women sit around a fire drinking honeyed brew, when just a few are able to stave off sleep. With heads nodding, drifting into the mist of a dream, one faithful storyteller will weave the old legends of the hillside, stories which church missionaries have done everything in their power to expunge.

Scholastique Mukasonga was born in Rwanda in 1956. Only two years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi, in which thirty seven members of her own family were killed, she moved to France. Her works have won, among many other prizes, the Ahmadou Kourouma, the Renaudot, the Océans France Ô, the Prix Simone de Beauvoir pour la liberté des femmes and the French Voices Award. Her other books include the novel Our Lady of the Nile and the Baillie Gifford-longlisted memoir The Barefoot Woman.