Burundi, indeed, is a small country in East Africa, with about 14 million people across 27,830 square kilometers. It was under German and Belgian colonial rule until 1962. The country has two primary ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi. The Germans and Belgians kept the Tutsi monarch intact, but the Belgians began cutting off some of the Hutu chiefs and aristocrats following World War I. As is too often the case in Africa, the European colonists upended national alliances and left everyone worse off.
This book opens in 1992 with the relaxed daily life of 10-year-old Gabriel. His father is a French ex-pat and his mother is mother is a Tutsi from Rwanda, which borders Burundi. They live in a wealthy neighborhood, and what we know–but they don’t–is that this idyll is going to end. A civil war breaks out in 1993 after Tutsi military officers killed Rwanda’s democratically elected Hutu president. Gabriel’s mother family is persecuted and then, finally, murdered in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Both countries were mired in power struggles that presented themselves as ethic hatreds.
Gabriel’s father and little sister go to France. Gabriel stays in Burundi with his mother. Both go forward, slowly, dealing with the violence and devastation that they have experienced.
I really liked this book. It’s a look at how a family’s fortunes can change quickly because of geopolitical forces, that have nothing to do with anything except power. That seems obvious, doesn’t it?
Small Country‘s author, Gaël Faye, is a French-Rwandan hip-hop artist who was born in Burundi. Much of the novel parallels his own life, except that he moved to France with his entire family at the outbreak of the civil war. This is an imagining of what could have happened if he had stayed, based in part on what happened to his friends and family. And it’s absolutely heartbreaking.
There are so many tragedies that emerged from World War II. To me, one of the worst is that so many people looked at the genocidal German Holocaust and declared “Never Again.” And then, they let it happen agan and again and again.
Anyway, this is worth reading.
