In Touch With the Breath of the World

Roland Rugero’s Baho! is a cyclone of a novel, a whirlwind of emotions and ideas skillfully compressed into 98 pages by the author and by his English translator, Christopher Schaefer. The book begins with a simple misunderstanding, which spirals out of control: the mute narrator, Nyamuragi, is mistakenly thought to be sexually harassing a young woman. As angry villagers pursue Nyamuragi, chasing him across the storied hilltops of rural Burundi, his mind rakes over his short lifetime of memories. At different points in the story of this pursuit, readers feel empathy for very single character—even the perpetrators of the violence. When Nyamuragi is finally caught and beaten, the labels of perpetrator and victim blur impossibly, leaving the reader uncertain not only of what transpired in this Central African village, but about the conventional wisdom that underpins our received narratives about violence.

Rugero persuades readers to consider different types of violence in layered simultaneity: gender-based violence, genocide, political violence, and the occasional brutality of village justice. His irresistible narrative voice demands that we not turn away. When my students and I read Baho!, we felt that we were experiencing a story told by someone old and wise. But Roland Rugero wrote the novel while still in his twenties, and it became the first novel by a Burundian writer to be translated into English.

Rugero was born in Burundi and grew up in Rwanda and Tanzania, surrounded by books in places where they were extremely rare. He publishes a magazine in a country where few people read for pleasure. He writes novels in French but conceives them in his mother tongue, Kirundi. He grapples with violence and beauty and what it means to live a literary life in a place where that is uncommon.

Rugero is a working artist—a journalist, a novelist, a screenwriter (he wrote and directed Burundi’s second-ever feature film), and an activist building a literary