In a 2020 interview in The White Review, Mukasonga speaks about her earlier novels, and about how, accidentally, in her rush to tell a story, she hit on the three unities of seventeenth-century French classicists—the unities of action, time, and place. In Kibogo, form follows a new function. Action and time disperse, becoming fragmented by tales told through multiple voices. Place looms all the larger without these two unities, as the stories and voices are united by their setting: a village at the foot of the formidable Mount Runani. The top of this mountain is where villagers and colonists alike, of all ages, of all walks of life, project their stories and imagine a sacred place of power and providence.
But not all stories are created equal. One sub-chief, a flunky for Western colonists, tells his people that Ruzagayura, the major drought for which the first chapter is named, was brought on by Hitler, “who could find no other way to beat us than to sabotage the horizon by which the rain comes.” This reappropriation of the Rwandan Imana is used, among other forms of coercion, as leverage to force children into harvesting pyrethrum, a daisy-like flower that yields natural insecticide, for Western soldiers in the North African theater to stave off malaria. In a striking parallel a few pages later, white priests instruct the villagers that “young girls should go pick flowers for the statue of Maria. Maria loves flowers and she has a merciful heart, she loves everyone, even black and ungrateful creatures like you.” So, flowers are presented as a sacrifice to the Western war machine, and to the oppressor’s religion—they read like a taxonomy of how not to elevate a story. These encroaching, disingenuous, top-down stories do not fill the void of the ancestral myths that have been deemed pagan and driven underground by missionaries attempting to Christianize the nation, but it is into this void that Mukasonga propels her book forward as the dissatisfied elders of the village start to remember how rain was summoned in the past.
Although in English there is no adverb that carries the nostalgic, almost fairytale weight of the French “autrefois” with which the first chapter’s five old men begin their reminiscences, Mark Polizzotti compensates through his naming of these elders: he calls them the “oldsters” rather than the more staid “old men,” “wise men,” or “sages” that could have been used to render the original vieillards and anciens. They are spritely and collaborative in their efforts to revive their myths and old ways—they interrupt each other; they build and correct. They tell of rainmakers passing drums on to one another, a shifting power that static figures of good and evil like Mary and Hitler cannot replicate in their crude wielding. They are a comic chorus whose quest for Kibogo and his quenching rain brings them to look for Mukamwezi, rumored bride of Kibogo and “last remaining pagan on the hillside.” But when this unlikely team ascends the mountain and brings the rain, Jesus gets credit rather than Kibogo.
A thread that runs through the book is general confusion about which celestial powers should receive credit (or blame) for disasters and blessings alike. Akayezu, a priest in training and protagonist of the book’s second section, uses this ambivalence to his advantage in refashioning himself as a priest who is an acolyte of both Jesus (his namesake) and Kibogo (about whom his mother is an expert storyteller). Akayezu draws a following among villagers for his syncretism and his pertinent questions like: “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? Had he never heard of Rwandans? Did we not interest him?” He creates a bridge between the two worlds and quickly brags that his storytelling is more popular than catechism classes. Even on pain of being tossed out of the seminary, he is adamant that priests not relegate Kibogo to the realm of “nocturnal tales.”
Mukasonga’s use of Kinyarwanda, maintained faithfully by Polizzotti, is beautiful especially insomuch as it never feels like a pandering lesson in vocabulary. Words are introduced many times (and in different contexts) before they are pinned down with a defining clause. The text keeps words like “mwami” and “Imana,” vague enough to take on meanings that are both ancestral and colonial. Moreover, the reader is not privileged—a non-Rwandan reader discovers meanings at the same rate as any of the novel’s clueless Western characters might. For instance, when Kabwa, one of the young characters in the book’s final section, appoints himself guide to Mount Runani and the Kibogo story, it is not until late in the chapter that we (and the anthropologist he is guiding) find out the meaning of his name—Little Dog. He explains that his humble name protects him from evil because “Why should one of our Imana, not to mention the all-powerful God of the priests, pay any attention to a little dog?”
This name, juxtaposed with Akayezu’s bombastic “little Jesus,” could almost unite in a trinity with the name of our titular character. Though it is not mentioned anywhere in the book, “Kibogo” can be translated as belly button, which is a word that embodies both the mystical in its evocation of a great chain of existence, and a sense of silliness, like a child’s game. This is just one more example of the ways Mukasonga subtly positions Kibogo, man and story, as the ultimate palimpsest.
These poetic and strategic uses of Kinyarwanda are not just for the unity of the story itself, but for the audience. In an interview with Littérature Sans Frontières on RFI, Mukasonga says she writes for young Rwandans, who do not yet have a national literature, who are trying to learn their history. In fact, throughout the story, she wryly sprinkles hints of Rwanda’s future beyond the book's mid-twentieth-century setting. In reflecting on the mysteries of the mountaintops, someone mentions “a beast up there, a monkey three times bigger than a man . . . and the whites like monkeys . . . imagine what cash we’d get,” a glancing hint of the controversies around gorilla and national park ecotourism that would explode later in the century. Even more poignantly, Mukasonga briefly describes priests who praise Hutu football players while saying Tutsi traditional dancers are effete—and not “true Rwandans.” This tiny anecdote tucked into the story is a microcosm of the way colonists sowed seeds of discord among two ethnically non-distinct groups who had coexisted for centuries.
Lutte contre l’oubli, or a struggle against forgetting, is Mukasonga’s goal for the young audience she cherishes. Her book is structured exactly to give that type of hope. Over the course of the story she transfers the manipulations and variations on Kibogo’s story from the hands of the “oldsters” gradually down to the “youngsters.” Her version of guarding this patrimony has nothing to do with maintaining purity or handing down from on high. For her country’s tales to stay alive and interesting it is essential to release the stories from that perfectly sculpted cattle horn that is Mount Runani’s cliff and let them ascend. Freedom and variation are the very nature of a living history. And as Kabwa explains, to excuse his own outlandish spin on the Kibogo story, “you need stories for every kind of ear.”
