When Scholastique Mukasonga was a child, she and her siblings would practice how to hide, so that when they heard the boots on the road, they would be ready. They would dive into piles of dried grass left for this purpose by their mother in the fields, or squeeze into the burrows of anteaters.
When the soldiers started patrolling the bush, Mukasonga’s mother came up with new hiding places inside the house: under beds, inside urns and baskets. “Those hiding places were meant more to comfort us than anything else,” writes Mukasonga, “because they never fooled anyone, least of all the soldiers who flushed us out in no time with vigorous kicks, all the while calling us cockroaches or little snakes.”
Mukasonga, author of the prize-winning novel Our Lady of the Nile, was born into a Tutsi family in Rwanda in 1956. Like many Tutsis, her parents were exiled in the 1960s by the Hutus to refugee villages near the Burundi border, and left to eke out a meagre existence, watched over by sporadically vicious soldiers. Mukasonga’s 2016 memoir Cockroaches recounted this period and foreshadowed – with often harrowing explicitness – the 1994 genocide, in which Mukasonga would lose 37 members of her family, including her parents, alongside 500,000 Tutsis.
Much softer in tone, The Barefoot Mother, her new memoir, is predominantly a love letter to her mother Stefania, who devoted every sinew to keeping her children alive. (Mukasonga only survived the massacre because her mother smuggled her and her brother into Burundi years earlier; since 1992, Mukasonga has lived in France.) It also memorialises a way of life under existential threat. Wrenched from their former life as cow farmers, the Tutsis were forced to abandon many old customs: one of the most memorable passages recounts Stefania’s determination to build herself an inzu, a traditional (now virtually extinct) straw Tutsi dwelling, not out of mere nostalgia: “It was only in the ancestral dwelling place that she’d find the strength… to replenish the energy she expended to save her children from a death an incomprehensible fate had planned out for them.”
Mukasonga’s memoir is a small act of resistance against that fate, an attempt to preserve what genocide destroyed. She paints a hazy picture of a frequently happy childhood, dominated by the harvest of the sorghum bean, games, stories and much drinking of beer – even a baby in need of an enema (applied using the hollowed stem of a squash) was an opportunity for a village celebration. There is much excitement when a local doctor sets up a surgery, which soon fades when it is discovered he has only aspirin and cough syrup.
