The Activist Girl Shaped by Western Colonialism: Gloriosa in Scholastique Mukasonga’s Notre-Dame du Nil

Nakagawa, Yuto

The Activist Girl Shaped by Western Colonialism: Gloriosa in Scholastique Mukasonga’s Notre-Dame du Nil

James Alexander Gordon on 28th November 2025

Author Information

Yuto Nakagawa, Kanazawa University, Japan

Abstract

Notre-Dame du Nil (2012), written by Scholastique Mukasonga (1956–), is set in Rwanda in the early 1970s. It describes a boarding school modeled after the one where the author Mukasonga actually went. The students are composed of two ethnic groups, Hutu and Tutsi: there are divisions among them, which are rooted in western colonialism. This paper focuses on an antagonist, Gloriosa, a Hutu student whose father is a great Hutu-supremacist politician. Gloriosa acts as a boss at school, looking down on the Tutsi students. Gloriosa’s character is shaped by her father’s ideology. The father’s generation experienced the period when Belgian colonialists favored Tutsi over Hutu. Hutu later achieved a rise in status, which they consider as a result of emancipation from this hierarchy. Belgium came to favor Hutu over Tutsi; the school’s atmosphere reflects this new hierarchy. Gloriosa destroys the Virgin statue because of its Tutsi-like features, while fabricating accusations against Tutsi, which triggers chaos both inside and outside the school. Gloriosa justifies her behavior as a legitimate act to defend Hutu-supremacy like her father does in society. This chaos appears the prelude to the genocide in 1994, when Hutu committed mass violence against Tutsi. Rather than viewing the genocide through simplistic moral binaries, this presentation investigates how Belgian colonialism brought Hutu and Tutsi into long-standing conflicts, as well as producing a radical activist like Gloriosa who lays the groundwork for the 1994 genocide.