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- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
'There is no better lycée than Our Lady of the Nile. Nor is there any higher. Twenty-five hundred metres, the white teachers proudly proclaim.' Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be moulded into respectable citizens, and to escape the dangers of the outside world. In the elite school run by white nuns, the young ladies learn, eat, sleep and gossip together. Fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the girls try on their parents' preconceptions and attitudes, transforming the lycée into a microcosm of the country's mounting racial tensions and violence. In the midst of the interminable rainy season, everything unfolds behind the closed doors of the school: friendship, curiosity, fear, deceit, and persecution. With masterful prose that is at once playful and penetrating, Mukasonga captures a society hurtling toward horror.
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Winner of the Prix Renaudot and Grand Prix of the French Voices award
Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary award and the FT/Oppenheimer funds emerging voices award
‘Mukasonga’s formidable talent turns this novel about Rwandan girls in a Catholic high school into a masterful story about genocide, colonialism, and all the ways that the world can manipulate and destroy the aspirations of girls.’ – Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King
‘Mukasonga’s masterpiece … The novel’s electricity comes from its deceptive lightness, the danse macabre of dorm intrigue on the cusp of Armageddon.’ – New York Review of Books
‘An astonishing book: Mukasonga’s style is so light, so charming, and yet her story could not be more sombre, more chastening, if it tried.’ – Guardian
‘In sentences of great beauty and restraint, Mukasonga rescues a million souls from the collective noun ‘genocide,’ returning them to us as individual human beings.’ Zadie Smith on The Barefoot Woman
Selected works by Scholastique Mukasonga
Cockroaches
The Barefoot Woman
Igifu
iii
CONTENTS
OUR LADY OF THE NILE
There is no better lycée than Our Lady of the Nile. Nor is there any higher. Twenty-five hundred metres, the white teachers proudly proclaim. ‘Two thousand four hundred ninety-three metres,’ points out Sister Lydwine, our geography teacher. ‘We’re so close to heaven,’ whispers Mother Superior, clasping her hands together.
The school year coincides with the rainy season, so the lycée is often wrapped in clouds. Sometimes, not often, the sun peeks through and you can see as far as the big lake, that shiny blue puddle down in the valley.
It’s a girls’ lycée. The boys stay down in the capital. The reason for building the lycée so high up was to protect the girls, by keeping them far away from the temptations and 4evils of the big city. Good marriages await these young lycée ladies, you see. And they must be virgins when they wed – or at least not get pregnant beforehand. Staying a virgin is better, for marriage is a serious business. The lycée’s boarders are daughters of ministers, high-ranking army officers, businessmen, and rich merchants. Their daughters’ weddings are the stuff of politics, and the girls are proud of this – they know what they’re worth. Gone are the days when beauty was all that mattered. Their families will receive far more than cattle or the traditional jugs of beer for their dowry, they’ll get suitcases stuffed full of banknotes or a healthy account with the Banque Belgolaise in Nairobi or Brussels. Thanks to their daughters, these families will grow wealthy, the power of their clans will be strengthened, and the influence of their lineage will spread far and wide. The young ladies of Our Lady of the Nile know just how much they are worth.
The lycée is very close to the Nile, to its source, in fact. To get there, you follow a rocky trail along the ridgeline. It leads to a flat parking area for the few tourist Land Rovers venturing that far. A sign reads: source of the nile → 200 m. A steep path brings you to a heap of rocks where the rivulet spurts between two stones. The water pools in a cement basin, then dribbles over in a thin cascade and along a little channel, before disappearing down the grassy hillside into the tree ferns of the valley. To the right, a pyramid 5has been erected, bearing the inscription: source of the nile. cock mission, 1924. It’s not a very tall pyramid: the girls from the lycée can easily touch the broken tip – they say it brings good luck. Yet it’s not the pyramid that draws them to the source. They’re not here to explore; they’re on a pilgrimage. The statue of Our Lady of the Nile looms among the large rocks overhanging the spring. It’s not quite a grotto, although a sheet-metal shelter protects her from the elements. our lady of the nile, 1953, reads the engraved pedestal. It was Monsignor the Vicar Apostolic who decided to erect the statue, in order to consecrate the Nile to the Virgin Mary, despite the King of Belgium persuading the Sovereign Pontiff to consecrate the whole country to Christ the King.
Some people still remember the unveiling ceremony. Sister Kizito, the old, somewhat frail cook, was there that day. Every year she describes the occasion to the new pupils. ‘Oh, it was a beautiful ceremony, similar to those you see in church, in Kigali, at Christmas or in the stadium, on Rwanda’s National Day.
‘The King’s official representative sent an envoy, but the colonial administrator was there too, flanked by an escort of ten soldiers. One held a bugle, another carried the Belgian flag. Various chiefs and deputy chiefs were in attendance, along with those from neighbouring chiefdoms. They brought their wives and daughters, who wore 6their hair piled high and pinned with pearls, they brought their dancers, who shook their manes like valiant lions, and of course they brought their herds of long-horned inyambo cattle decked with flower garlands. The hillside was thronged with farmers. Naturally, the whites from the capital didn’t dare venture onto the rough path that led to the spring. But Monsieur de Fontenaille, the coffee planter who lived next door to the lycée, was there, sitting beside the administrator. It was the dry season. The sky was clear. No haze wreathed the mountain peaks.
‘We waited. Finally, a black line could be seen approaching on the ridge path, and a murmur of hymns and prayers arose. One by one they came into focus: Monsignor the Vicar Apostolic, with his mitre and crosier, looking like one of the Three Wise Men from the pictures they show in catechism class. The missionaries walked behind him: they wore pith helmets, as all the whites did back then, but were bearded and dressed in long white robes with a chunky rosary around their necks. Children from the Legion of Mary strewed the path with yellow petals. Then came the Virgin. Four seminary boys in shorts and white shirts carried her on a plaited-bamboo litter, the kind used to take a young bride to her new family or the dead to their final resting place. But it was impossible to see the Madonna because she was wrapped in a blue and white veil. Behind her jostled the “native clergy”, and then, preceded by their banner and the white and yellow papal 7flag, came the straggling line of catechism pupils, straying cheerfully off the path onto the slopes, despite the best efforts of the monitors with their sticks.
‘The procession reached the hollow and the spring; the Madonna’s palanquin was lowered beside the stream – she was still hidden beneath the veil. The administrator stepped forward and greeted Monsignor with a military salute, exchanging a few words while the rest of the procession took up position around the spring and the statue, which had been raised onto a little stage. The Bishop climbed the five steps with two missionaries, blessed the crowd, then turned to face the statue and recited an oration in Latin, with the two priests giving the response. Suddenly, with a nod and a wave from the Bishop, one of the acolytes unveiled the Madonna. The bugle sounded, the flag was dipped and a hushed murmur spread through the crowd. The hollow filled with the women’s sharp cries of joy and the jingling of the dancers’ ankle bells. The Virgin who appeared from beneath the veil certainly resembled Our Lady of Lourdes, who can be seen at the mission church dressed in the same blue veil, the same azure belt, the same yellow dress, but Our Lady of the Nile was black: her face was black, her hands were black, her feet were black. Our Lady of the Nile was a black woman, an African woman, a Rwandan woman – and indeed, why not?
‘“It’s Isis,” cried Monsieur de Fontenaille. “She has returned!”8
‘And so, with a vigorous sprinkling of holy water, Monsignor the Vicar Apostolic blessed the statue, blessed the spring and blessed the crowd. Then he delivered his sermon. Not all of what he said was comprehensible. He spoke of the Holy Virgin, and how she would be known here as Our Lady of the Nile. He said: “The drops of this holy water shall mix with the burgeoning waters of the Nile, which in turn shall mix with other streams and become The River, flowing through lakes, flowing through swamps, pouring over waterfalls, braving the desert sands, soaking the cells of bygone monks, even lapping at the feet of the surprised Sphinx. It is as if, by the grace of Our Lady of the Nile, these holy drops were to baptise all of Africa; and Africa – now Christian – shall save this world from perdition. And I see, yes, I see, crowds thronging here from all the nations in pilgrimage, yes, in pilgrimage, to our mountains, to give grace to Our Lady of the Nile.”’
When his turn came, Chief Kayitare walked up to the stage and called to Rutamu, his cow, which he offered to the new Queen of Rwanda. He praised both the cow and the Virgin Mary, saying they would provide milk and honey in abundance. The women’s cries of joy and the tinkle of the dancers’ bells approved this auspicious gift.
A few days later, workers from the mission arrived to erect a platform between the two colossal rocks overhanging the spring. They placed the statue on it, beneath 9a shelter of sheet metal. It was much later that they built the lycée, two kilometres away, just as Rwanda gained independence.
Perhaps Monsignor hoped that the spring’s holy water would prove to be as miraculous as that of Lourdes. Alas no. There is only Kagabo the healer – or poisoner – who fills small black jugs shaped like a calabash with water from the spring. In these he soaks scary-looking roots, sloughed-off snake skins crushed into powder, tufts of hair from stillborns and the dried blood from girls’ first menstruations. Concoctions to heal, or to kill, it depends.
For a long time, the photos of the unveiling ceremony of Our Lady of the Nile lined the long corridor where visitors, or parents who had requested a meeting with Mother Superior, were asked to wait. Now there was only one photograph still hanging: the one with Monsignor the Vicar Apostolic blessing the statue. Only traces of the others remained, the slightly paler marks of rectangular frames on the wall, there behind the hard-wooden sofa – no cushion in sight – on which the unfortunate pupils summoned by the fearsome Mother Superior never dared to sit. Yet the photos hadn’t been destroyed. Gloriosa, Modesta and Veronica found them one day when they were asked to clean the room at the back of the library where the archives were stacked. There, under a heap of old newspapers and magazines (Kinyamateka, Kurerera 10Imana, L’Ami, Grands Lacs, etc.), they found the photos, slightly discoloured and warped, some still covered by a sheet of broken glass. There was the photo of the administrator making his military salute before the statue, and the soldier behind him dipping the Belgian flag. There were the photos of the intore dancers – slightly blurred because the inept photographer tried to capture their impressive leaps in mid-air, which caused their sisal manes and leopard skins to be wreathed in a ghostly halo. Then there was the photo of the chiefs and their wives in all their finery, but most of these dignitaries had been crossed through with a wide stroke of red ink, and the faces of others masked by a question mark in black.
‘The chiefs’ photos have suffered the social revolution,’ said Gloriosa, laughing. ‘A dash of ink, a slash of machete, that’s all it takes … and no more Tutsi.’
‘What about the ones with a question mark?’ Modesta wanted to know.
‘Alas, they must be the ones who managed to flee! But now that they’re in Bujumbura or Kampala, those big chiefs have lost their cattle, and their pride. They drink water like the pariahs they’ve become. I’m taking the photos. My father will tell me who these whip masters are.’
Veronica wondered when she, too, would be crossed out with red ink, on the annual class photograph taken at the start of the school year.11
The pupils of Our Lady of the Nile make their great pilgrimage in May, the Virgin Mary’s month. Pilgrimage day is a long and beautiful one, and the lycée spends many months preparing for it. Prayers are given for good weather. Mother Superior and Father Herménégilde, the chaplain, announce a novena and request that every class relay each other in the chapel to ask the Holy Virgin to chase off the clouds on that given day! After all, it’s quite possible in May: the rains become less frequent as the dry season approaches. For a whole month now, Brother Auxile has been rehearsing the hymns he’s written in honour of Our Lady of the Nile. Brother Auxile is the resident handyman, peering into the oily entrails of the electric generator, or the engines of the two supply trucks, cursing the drivers and the servant-mechanics, in his Ghent dialect. He plays the harmonium and conducts the choir. The Belgian teachers were urged to take part in the ceremony, as were the three young Frenchmen posted here in lieu of military service. Mother Superior hinted, gently but firmly, that as it was a solemn occasion, they should wear a jacket and tie, instead of those ugly trousers they call blue jeans, and that she was counting on them to behave respectfully and set an example for the pupils. Sister Bursar spent a good part of the night in the pantry, setting aside items for the picnic: corned beef, sardines in oil, jam, Kraft cheese. You could hear the jangle of the huge bunch of keys attached to her leather belt. She counted out just enough crates of 12Fanta for the pupils, and a few bottles of Primus lager for the chaplain, Brother Auxile and Father Angelo from the nearby mission. For the Rwandan Sisters, the teachers and the school monitors, she put aside a demijohn of pineapple wine, the specialty of Sister Kizito, who jealously guards the secret recipe.
Of course Mass is endless that day, with hymns, prayers and dozens of rosary recitations, but best of all is the wild laughter of the girls as they race and romp about, sliding down the grassy slope. Sister Angélique and Sister Rita, the school monitors, blow the hell out of their whistles, bellowing: ‘Watch out for the ravine!’
Mats are laid down for the picnic. It’s not like in the refectory, it’s more chaotic, everyone can sit however they like, they can squat down or stretch out, their mouths smeared with jam. The school monitors raise their arms to the sky in defeat. Mother Superior, Sister Gertrude (Mother Superior’s Rwandan deputy), Sister Bursar, Father Herménégilde and Father Angelo all sit on folding chairs. The teachers are also allowed chairs, but the French teachers prefer to sit on the grass. Sister Rita serves the men beer – only a Rwandan woman could have such good manners. Mother Superior of course refuses the Primus she’s offered, and Sister Bursar reluctantly does the same, making do with some of Sister Kizito’s pineapple wine.
It’s rare to see an actual pilgrim mingling with the pupils, since Mother Superior aims to keep at bay any 13unwelcome guests who might, on a ‘devotional’ pretext, be drawn by the sight of such a gathering of young girls. The mayor of Nyaminombe district, where the lycée is located, has prohibited access to the spring at Mother Superior’s request. Even the government minister’s wife, who invited a few girlfriends along in her Mercedes to dote on their pious daughters, has a hard time persuading the police officer to lift the barrier. But there’s one visitor Mother Superior can’t keep away, and that’s Monsieur de Fontenaille, the coffee grower. The girls are a bit scared of him. People say he lives alone in his large dilapidated villa. Most of his coffee bushes are going to seed. Nobody knows if he’s deranged or a white witch doctor as he goes about organising digs to search for bones and skulls. His old jeep ignores the paths, jolting up and down the mountain slopes. He always breezes in, mid-picnic, sweeping off his bush hat in a theatrical gesture to greet Mother Superior, exposing his shaven head: ‘Please accept my deepest respects, Reverend Mother.’
She struggles to hide her annoyance: ‘Good day, Monsieur de Fontenaille, we weren’t expecting you. Please, don’t intrude on our pilgrimage.’
‘Like you, I’m here to honour our Mother of the Nile,’ he replies while turning his back to her. Slowly, he circles each mat where the girls are eating their lunches, stops near one of them, unconsciously adjusts his glasses, searches her face while nodding, pleased with himself, 14and begins to sketch her profile in his notebook. She’ll lower her gaze, as well-brought-up girls do, to avoid his piercing stare, then look away, yet some of the girls can’t help slipping him a sly smile. Mother Superior doesn’t dare intervene, for fear of causing an even greater scandal, but she follows the old plantation owner’s movements with apprehension. At last, he trundles to the little pool brimming with water from the spring, takes a handful of scarlet petals from one of his many jacket pockets and throws them into the headwaters of the Nile. Then he raises his arms to the sky three times, palms spread, arms wide and mumbles some incomprehensible incantation. As soon as Monsieur de Fontenaille returns to the parking lot and we hear his jeep begin to stutter, Mother Superior stands and declares: ‘Come, young ladies, let’s sing a hymn.’ The girls sing in unison, some of them gazing wistfully at the dust trail from the retreating jeep.
Upon returning to the lycée, Veronica opens up her geography book. It’s quite tricky to follow the course of the Nile, she has no name to start off with and then there are too many. She seems to have multiple sources, she hides in a lake, resurfaces, turns white, then gets lost in a swamp, while her Blue brother appears somewhere else. She’s easier to keep track of near the end, where she flows in a straight line, with desert on either side, lapping at the foot of the pyramids – the big ones – before spreading 15chaotically into the delta and finally gushing into the sea, which is far bigger than the lake, so they say.
Veronica realises that someone is peering over her shoulder, staring at the open page of the textbook with her.
‘So, are you looking for the way back to where your people came from, Veronica? Don’t worry, I’ll pray to Our Lady of the Nile that the crocodiles carry you there on their backs, or rather in their bellies.’
Veronica would be forever haunted by Gloriosa’s laugh, especially in her nightmares.
BACK TO SCHOOL
Our Lady of the Nile: how proudly the school stands. The track leading to the lycée from the capital winds its interminable way through a labyrinth of hills and valleys and ends, quite unexpectedly, in a twisting climb up the Ikibira Mountains – which geography textbooks call the Congo-Nile range, for want of any other name. The lycée’s imposing main building comes into view, and it almost feels as if the peaks have eased themselves aside to make room for the school, there on the edge of the opposite slope, at the bottom of which you glimpse the sparkling lake. The lycée sits on the mountaintop, glinting at the schoolgirls, a palace that shines with their impossible dreams.17
The construction of the lycée was a spectacle that Nyaminombe won’t forget in a long time. Not wishing to miss a thing, the normally idle men abandoned their jugs of beer in the bar, the women left their fields of millet and peas earlier than usual, and at the sound of the beating drum that announced the end of class, the mission-school children ran out and scrambled through the small crowd watching and commenting on the work in progress, to be in the front row. The more intrepid pupils had already slipped out of school to line the track, watching for the dust cloud that would announce the arrival of the trucks. As soon as the convoy reached them, they ran behind the vehicles and tried to grab hold. Some succeeded, others fell off and barely missed getting run over by the next truck. The drivers hollered in vain, trying to shoo away the swarm of daredevil kids. Some stopped their vehicles and stepped down, and the kids would scamper off, with the driver pretending to chase them, but as soon as the truck started off again, the game began anew. The women in the fields lifted their hoes to the heavens in a gesture of powerlessness and desperation.
Everyone was amazed to see no smoking pyramids of baking bricks, no procession of farmers carrying bricks on their heads, as they did when the umupadri asked the faithful to build a new church annex or when the mayor summoned the local people on a Saturday to help with community projects, such as enlarging the clinic or his house. No, this 18was a real white man’s construction site in Nyaminombe, with real white labourers, fearsome iron-jawed machines that ripped and gouged the earth, trucks carrying machines that made an infernal racket and spewed cement, foremen barking orders in Swahili at the masons and even 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.
Of all the lore surrounding the construction site, the most memorable is the story of Gakere. The Gakere Affair. People still recount it today, and it always raises a laugh. The end of each month was payday in Nyaminombe – the thirtieth, a perilous day. Perilous for bookkeepers, subjected to the workers’ often violent complaints. Perilous for the day labourers who knew that the thirtieth was the only date their wives remembered: they’d not be in the fields but waiting in the doorway of the hut to take the banknotes their husband handed them; they’d check the amount, tie a piece of banana fibre around the paltry wad, slip it into a little jug and hide it under the straw by the bedside table. The thirtieth was marked by all kinds of quarrels and violence.
Tables for the bookkeepers were set up beneath awnings, or under shelters made from straw and bamboo. Gakere was a bookkeeper, and it was he who paid the day labourers. He was a former deputy chief of Nyaminombe, 19who had been purged like so many others by the colonial authorities and replaced by another deputy chief (soon to be mayor), who was a Hutu. Gakere was hired because he knew everyone, all the local hired hands who didn’t speak Swahili. Bookkeepers from the capital were hired to pay the others, the real builders, who’d come from elsewhere and did speak Swahili. Everyone queued at the bookkeepers’ tables – come rain (usually) or shine – and there was always shouting and shoving, complaints, arguments and recriminations. The heavies who guarded the construction site kept order, whacking the recalcitrant workers into submission with their sticks – the mayor and his two gendarmes didn’t want to get involved, neither did the whites. So Gakere settled beneath his shelter with his cash box under his arm. He sat down, placed the little box on the table and opened it. The cash box was full of banknotes. Slowly, he unfolded the sheet of paper, a list of names of all the workers he had to pay, workers who’d waited hours. He began the roll call: Bizimana, Habineza … The labourer approached the table. Gakere pushed the few notes and coins owed toward him, the labourer pressed an ink-blackened finger next to his name and Gakere muttered a few words to him as he marked the list with a cross. So for an entire day, Gakere was again the chief he had once been.
Then, one payday he didn’t show up: no Gakere, no cash box. It was soon known that he’d run off with the little box stuffed full of notes. ‘He’s gone to Burundi,’ 20people said. ‘Crafty Gakere, he’s fled with the Bazungu’s money, but how will we get paid now?’ Gakere was both admired and condemned: ‘He shouldn’t have taken the money intended for the people of Nyaminombe, he could have figured out how to take the money from somewhere else.’ But, in the end, the day labourers did get paid, people stopped begrudging Gakere and no more was heard of him for two months. He’d abandoned his wife and his daughters, who were questioned by the mayor and closely watched by the gendarmes. But Gakere hadn’t told them of his dishonest plans: rumour had it that he planned to use the money to take a new wife in Burundi, a younger, prettier one. And then he returned to Nyaminombe, hands tied behind his back, two soldiers escorting him. He had never reached Burundi. He’d been afraid to cross Nyungwe Forest, because of the leopards, the big monkeys and even the elephants who hadn’t roamed the forest for years. He’d travelled the entire country with that little cash box under his arm. He’d tried to cross the large swamps in Bugesera, and lost his way. Burundi wasn’t far but he’d wandered in circles through the stands of papyrus sedge, without ever reaching the border, which, it’s true, wasn’t marked. They eventually found him, on the edge of the swamp, thin and exhausted, his legs swollen. The banknotes were nothing but a spongy mass floating in his water-filled cash box. They tied him to a post by the site entrance for a whole day, to serve as an example. The 21workers filing past didn’t curse or spit at him, just lowered their heads and pretended not to notice. His wife and his two daughters sat at his feet. One of them would get up from time to time, wipe his face and give him a drink. Gakere was convicted but didn’t stay in prison very long. He was never seen in Nyaminombe again. It could be that he reached Burundi at last with his wife and daughters, but without his little box. Some wondered whether the Bazungu had cast a spell on the banknotes, whether those wretched notes had made poor Gakere spin like a top and that was why he never managed to reach Burundi.
The lycée is a large four-storey building, higher than the government ministries in the capital. When the new girls first arrive, the ones from the countryside are afraid to get too close to the windows in the fourth-floor dorms. ‘Are we going to sleep perched like little monkeys?’ they ask. The town girls, and the veterans, tease the new arrivals, pushing them toward the windows: ‘Look down there,’ they say. ‘You’re going to fall into the lake!’ Eventually, the new girls get used to it. The chapel, nearly as high as the mission church, is also made of cement, but the gym, bursar’s office, workshops and Brother Auxile’s garage are all made of brick. They form a courtyard closed off by a wall, with a metal gate that whines when it’s opened in the morning and closed at night, much louder than the wake-up and bedtime bells.22
A bit off to the side, there are some small one-storey houses, some call them villas, others bungalows, where the foreign teachers live. There’s also a big house, much larger than the others, that everyone calls the Bungalow. It’s reserved for special guests, such as government ministers (should one ever come to stay), or the Bishop, whose visit is anticipated each year. Occasional tourists from the capital, or from Europe – who’ve come to see the source of the Nile – are put up there. Between these houses and the lycée, there’s a garden with a lawn, flower beds, bamboo groves and a vegetable patch, of course. The servants who do the gardening grow cabbages, carrots, potatoes and strawberries; there’s even a wheat plot. The tomatoes they harvest here are so pompously plump, they put the inyanya – the poor little native tomatoes – to shame. Sister Bursar likes to show visitors around the exotic orchard where the expatriated apricot and peach trees clearly hanker for their native climate. Mother Superior always says that the pupils must get used to civilised food.
A high brick wall was built to discourage intruders and thieves; and at night, guards armed with spears patrol the perimeter and stand watch by the iron gate.
After a while, the people of Nyaminombe stopped noticing the lycée. As far as they’re concerned, it’s like the huge rocks in Rutare – which seem to have rolled down the 23mountain and stopped there, in Rutare, for no apparent reason. Yet the construction of the lycée changed many things in the district. A flurry of covered stalls appeared by the builders’ campsite, comprising traders who had previously operated close to the mission, and others from goodness knows where. These shops sold the things shops generally sell: individual cigarettes, palm oil, rice, salt, Kraft cheese, margarine, lamp oil, banana beer, Primus lager, Fanta and sometimes even bread, though not often. There were also bars, referred to as ‘hotels’, serving goat on skewers with grilled bananas and beans, and there were shacks for the loose women who brought the village into disrepute. When the lycée was completed, most of the traders left, except for three bars, two shops and a tailor: so a new village sprang up by the path leading to the lycée. Even the market, which moved close to the workers’ shacks, stayed put, just beyond the stalls.
