The dictator of the dorm: Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga, reviewed

In the cloud-capped highlands of Rwanda, even the rain-makers sound like crashing snobs. When two teenage pupils from Our Lady of the Nile lycée slope off to consult the sorceress Nyamirongi about some boyfriend trouble, she sizes up their genealogies and comes over all Mitford duchess: ‘You’re not from very good families. But nowadays they say it no longer matters.’ Like so much in Scholastique Mukasonga’s novel, it’s a comic scene with a rumble of menace in the background — akin to the rainy season’s distant thunder in these lush, green hills. Where you belong — your people, your connections, your identity — has been a matter of life and death before. Soon it will be again.

Raised in Rwanda, Mukasonga fled into exile in 1973, first to neighbouring Burundi and then to France, when an earlier wave of persecution targeted the country’s Tutsi minority. Her memoir Cockroaches appeared in 2006, and this novel in 2012; it won three prizes. During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda she lost 37 family members.

Even in this story, set in the late 1970s, Tutsi girls — subject to a 10 per cent admissions quota — must accept their lowly status as ‘cockroaches, snakes, rodents’. Over them stand the Hutu, those ‘children of the hoe’ — ‘doughty, democratic farmers’, according to colonial-era myths now enshrined in law. Empowered by ethnic ‘delusions’ from the imperial age, which framed the Tutsi as ‘Hamitic’ interlopers from the north, the Hutu ruled Rwanda after Belgium’s mandate ended.

Posh schools in fiction often serve as breeding grounds of tyranny. The seeds of autocracy sprout in the microcosmic corridors of swanky establishments from Austria (Musil’s Young Törless) to Peru (Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero), by way of Muriel Spark’s, and Miss Jean Brodie’s, 1930s Edinburgh.