Tensions at a school for privileged girls in Rwanda foreshadow the 1994 genocide in this surprisingly bright, light-touch debut

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.”