Everything I know about Afghanistan, I learned primarily from Khaled Hosseini’s books. By everything, I mean the way Afghans live, their day-to-day activities, relationships, the food, the architecture, culture, religion, media - and everything in between. Books and writers have that power: to introduce readers to new peoples, cultures, and places in the most captivating way. ALSO READ: Alexis Kagame, Bigirumwami, Mukagasana receive lifetime literary awards Speaking of places, let’s discuss Bugesera in literary works by Rwandan (and friends of Rwanda) authors. In history class, we learned about Bugesera and the region’s important place in Rwanda’s rich and devastating history. “On his (Jean Baptiste) return home in December 1959, he found an even worse fate was in store for him and his family. Hutu hardliners had begun to visit all the Tutsi houses in the region, daubing their doors with a single brush stroke of paint. The same night, they came back and set them on fire. The terrified occupants fled to a Catholic mission for safety. There, the Belgian administrator came to visit and suggested they should go into exile, asking each person to name a neighbouring country where they wished to be taken. When most of the Tutsi, including Jean Baptiste, elected to stay in Rwanda, the Belgians decided that they should be moved en masse to the uninhabited Bugesera region in the south of Rwanda. There was a good reason this place was so unpopulated - it was a dry, arid region infested with swarms of tsetse flies that bred in the marshes,” wrote Andrew Wallis in Stepp’d in Blood. The main purpose of this mass relocation was not to protect the Tutsi, but rather to send them to their deaths. ALSO READ: A look at Genocide in Rwandan literature over past 30 years The hope was that no one would survive the harsh conditions of Bugesera. If they miraculously did, tsetse flies would swiftly finish the job. Many died of disease or starvation, and many were killed. But, of course, a few survived. Those who did lived in, for lack of a better word, unenviable conditions. Mukasonga tries to paint what life in Bugesera - more precisely, Nyamata - was like during the period from 1960 to 1994. Her family’s story is one of thousands of Rwandans who had been relocated there by Belgian administrators. ALSO READ: Fifteen books that help you get the true story of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi In La femme aux pieds nus (The Barefoot Woman), a book she wrote as an homage to her mother Stefania, Mukasonga vividly conveys these conditions. There was a constant fear that the military would - and indeed did - barge in at any moment. One evening, as Stefania and her children were sitting on umusambi sharing dinner, soldiers kicked in the door, stormed the house, overturned the shared plate, and stepped on Antoine’s chest until he could barely breathe. This was not an isolated incident; it was a regular occurrence that families in Bugesera had to be prepared for. In addition to this never-ending fear, hunger and the lack of clean water shaped daily life. In L’Iguifou, a collection of stories by the same author, Mukasonga’s first story narrates how Colomba, the main character, once fainted from hunger, and her mother had to go knocking on neighbours' doors, who in turn were able to assemble sorghum flour to prepare the porridge that brought her back to life. ALSO READ: Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust Picture life in a deserted region devoid of life, with an abundance of all types of insects - including tsetse flies. Despite all this, mothers still took care of their children, daughters still cleaned their houses’ compounds and neighbourhoods, and families still arranged marriages for their sons and celebrated new unions - an irrefutable sign of hope for the future, that things could get better one day. Mukasonga recounts how Stefania walked long distances to check on her friends and to court potential wives for her eldest son, Antoine. When she found a girl fit for her son, the next task was to acquire the dowry, which they did not have at the time, given their limited resources. Culturally, the dowry holds great significance and can never be ignored, no matter the circumstances - and of course, it has to be a cow, or cows. It took time, and Antoine lost Mukasine (the first fiancée) to a man from a noble family, but Stefania managed to secure the cow and arranged a beautiful marriage for him with Jeanne. Beyond the main story and its heroine, Stefania, Mukasonga introduces themes that reveal her priorities as a mother navigating Bugesera’s harsh conditions - planting medicinal plants and grains to keep her family alive, saving bread for neighbourhood children when Alexia (Mukasonga’s elder sister who attended an elite boarding school) brought some home, and more - to establish a fragile semblance of normal life. Stefania’s way of living - her mundane tasks, struggles, sacrifices, fierceness in protecting her children, determination, respect for culture, optimism, and assumption of the mother’s role in both small and large matters despite all odds - allows the reader to be transported to that time and gain a glimpse of what Rwandan mothers and grandmothers had to endure in that place during that period. If you picture Bugesera in 1959 from Wallis’s passage, trace its evolution through Mukasonga’s story, and then visit the region today, speeches from last year’s presidential campaign in Gahanga weigh even more. Rwanda’s transformation becomes clearer, more admirable, and almost miraculous - and, most importantly, very intentional. Moving on from Bugesera, the main purpose of this essay is to make a case for Rwandan authors, as we witness a rise in book clubs and literary discourse across different platforms. It is unfortunate that instead of reading Scholastique Mukasonga’s Notre-Dame du Nil in high school - a story deeply relatable to us - we read Le Petit Prince and Les Misérables. Excellent books by all means but exclusively French authors. Recommendations for African authors often include Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Wole Soyinka - writers embraced by Western audiences and academia. Our authors should be on the same lists, at least in our schools, book clubs, humble home libraries, and conversations. Our philosophers and poets deserve the same respect in intellectual debates. I wish we bragged about studying Alexis Kagame’s Inganji Kalinga the same way we do about Fanon’s texts - not that bragging is ever commendable. You know that surreal feeling when an author describes a character, a moment, an object, or a place so vividly that you can almost touch it, feel it, or see yourself there. It becomes even more profound when you have been to the place being described, or when the character could easily be you, your mother, or your friend; someone your imagination has access to. It is an indescribable feeling. Let’s read our authors. The writer is a socio-political commentator.
