Two books by writers from Burundi, set there, that give a real sense of the place: Small Country and Baho!.
Very few books by Burundian writers have been translated into English, so the shelf is small. Kirundi, the national language, has an oral tradition of storytelling and poetry, and French is also an official language, so writing is spread across more than one tongue. What has been translated mostly looks back on the civil war of the 1990s and the Hutu-Tutsi divisions behind it.
Roland Rugero's Baho! is a short novel in which a mute young man's misunderstood gesture turns a village against him. Gaël Faye's Small Country recalls a boy's childhood in 1990s Bujumbura as games and family life give way to war. Tracy Kidder, an American journalist, portrays in Strength in What Remains a Burundian medical student, Deogratias, who escapes to New York. René Lemarchand's Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide is a scholarly history tracing Hutu-Tutsi politics from the monarchy to the massacres of 1972 and 1993.
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A boy's childhood in 1990s Bujumbura, where neighbourhood games and family life give way to Burundi's civil war and the shadow of Rwanda's genocide.
A short novel in which a mute young man's misunderstood gesture turns a Burundian village against him, in the shadow of the civil war.
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