(Read in French)

Bewitching collection of interlinked stories about the clash between tradition and modernity in colonial Rwanda. Mukasonga shows how colonialism can never be done “correctly”, no matter how you try to put a benevolent face on it. Christianity, even in its platitudes of universal love, becomes corrupted by racial hierarchy; the supposedly objective practice of scientific research becomes a conduit for the glory of academics, and turns the colonized society into a Petri dish for study. No matter what promises the colonizer makes, the system is built for their benefit, and cannot function any other way.

What makes this book more interesting is the way it portrays the colonized’s struggle for agency in a system that is designed to suck them dry - the whites that came to the area did bring with them advanced technology, education, agricultural techniques, etc. As a colonized person, is it better to fight against the colonizer, or do your best to take what you can from their system, rise in the ranks, and maybe make change from the top down? No matter how clearly this dream can be seen as the false hope that it is, it is still almost impossible not to be seduced by power, and be bought off to do power’s bidding. ( )

Beautiful and clever. I love the weaving of myth and critique. Great story-telling. ( )

Religions, especially Catholicism or Christianity, are so vague and absorbent that all phenomena can find themselves subsumed within them. Any tragedy is God's plan and any windfall is God's grace. Missionaries are playing a game of God-loving Katamari Damacy, where you roll around the world crushing & collecting people, belongings, landmarks, and really whatever you're large enough to dominate. Since God is above all, other religions are pagan superstitions or temptations created by the Devil. In Kibogo, Mukasonga describes that religious colonialism across generations, from skeptical introduction to Christianity to stalwart belief, but with the underflowing belief in Rwanda as it is and has always been.

The middle of the book, the Akayezu & Mukamwezi chapters, display the bizarre syncretism between Rwandan folklore and Christian colonialism. The conversion from the former to the latter occurs more so out of necessity than desire - Rwandan villagers are wracked by drought and poverty, and all the other maladies that follow in the footsteps of drought & poverty. The Belgian missionaries have resources, but only at the cost of conversion and obedience. One of the recurring themes in this book is playing on the perception of Rwandan (and Africans) as savages who know not what they do. The Rwandans share a distance from these white missionaries who always arrive in a cloud of dust from their expensive vehicles. The Rwandans listen to their spiels perfunctorily, sometimes with obvious exasperation, until they leave again. They're entertaining these religious diatribes until the food & money comes out. However from the perspective of the missionaries, they're hanging on every word and depending on them for more than just necessities.

"We know what prayers are needed to bring back the rain. But we, the benevolent priests, we will not hide them from you, as the witchdoctors do their maledictions. You shall learn them at catechism and we shall recite them and we shall sing them together, every day of the week." This grants the priests the cozy position to attribute any rain to their prayers and the lack of rain to lack of praying. It's a win-win. However, "Everyone was used to [the priest's] reprimands," and "everyone knew perfectly well that those who consulted witchdoctors would still go see them, that those who were initiated into Kubandwa would still get up in the small hours of the night to celebrate their worship." Despite this continuing belief in their own religion, the Rwandans follow the missionary's "directives" the way you knock on wood when discussing a possibly bad outcome. It's a free & harmless way of hedging your bets. I'm not superstitious, but if there is such a thing I'm covered.

The survival of Rwandan religion is a nocturnal one. The preservation of a people's history must occur at night when the colonialist gaze is obscured by restful eyelids. The villagers continue seeking guidance from elders and spiritual leaders when it's only the Rwandans who are still awake. Yet even so, there's moments throughout the story where elders talk over each other and claim they're telling the stories wrong. The reader sees the folklore of Rwanda drying up and falling apart the way their crops do in the drought. It's when they need their land again do they water the roots of their beliefs, but in a way that makes clear they're out of practice.

Ultimately, the spirituality is a means to an end, but the beauty of this book is exploring how regardless of their motivation, the use of ancestry and folklore as a perennial crutch guarantees its survival all the same. When the Belgian professor arrives to seek examples of human sacrifice in Rwandan culture (a search that's actually willing a racist fable into existence for the sake of academic prestige), he uses a local boy's knowledge (and body) as a figurative & literal crutch. He depends on the boy to dredge his village's history for evidence of fictional practices. The boy's belief is clearly real, but he depends on his importance to the professor to secure his future (enrollment in a white school, marriage to a white woman, property outside Africa). Both are selfishly motivated, but one is decidedly more parasitic. The boy appears to leverage his heritage to abandon it, but his motivations are irrelevant when his actions and existence enable Rwandan history to experience another breath.

When the professor's plane crashes into a mountain range on his return trip, the nocturnal storytellers maintain "Kibogo struck with his Thunder-Spear the thieves of bones, the thieves of memory." Whether this is true or not is just as irrelevant, because this book is not about the facticity of Rwandan religion over Western religion. It's about the survival of a people in the face of erasure, and the stubborn persistence of belief. It's about the way words and stories trudge through time even in bastardized forms, to imbue the new with the shade of history, which always looms large so long as someone's there to tell the stories. ( )

Kibogo tells of the conflict between native Rwandan religious beliefs and the Christian religion brought by European colonizers. This short book is divided into four parts, with each part revealing a little more of the legend of Kibogo, and how his worship is suppressed by the missionaries who twist their own religion to further their agenda. A very well-told and thought-provoking tale.

Received via NetGalley. ( )

In colonial Rwanda a drought has driven the elders to seek the help of the outcast bride of Kibogo despite the hold the Catholic church has on the rest of the hillside population and indeed the country. The ravages of colonialism continue to warp and elaborate the Kibogo myth and the lives of the locals through out the book. ( )