Note: This review is not spoiler-free! 

In colonial Rwanda, a young girl named Ikirezi has her health restored by the touch of Sister Deborah’s hands. Sister Deborah has come to Rwanda with American missionaries, and for a novel of this setting, it is rather surprising to see the wry epigraph “I met God; she’s Black.” Unlike the other established missionaries in the area, Sister Deborah comes as a Black woman prophet, with seemingly miraculous abilities. Sister Deborah’s influence grows in Ikirezi’s community, and she amasses female converts who believe in her promise of a Black woman messiah, who will transform Rwanda into a realm ruled by women. But the cult is not without resistance; it collapses into violence, and Sister Deborah disappears. The novella moves between storytellers and versions of history, delivering a story that could never fit into a single truth or archive box.

Sister Deborah’s greatest strength is in the layers of interpretation and unreliability that the narrators deliver. Sister Deborah is vibrant, even as she abandons the name and reintroduces herself to Ikirezi and the reader, years after her disappearance from Ikirezi’s village, as “Mama Nganga.” At this point, about halfway through the book, she takes up the story and tells of her visions of a Black woman spirit and how those visions were the reason for her arrival in Rwanda. Sister Deborah’s story, as told to Ikirezi, walks through competing influences of Rwandan tradition and colonial religion, and stacks dreams, delirium, visions, and reality upon each other. Sister Deborah falls into a coma after an illness, sees herself ascending a mountain, and retrieving the iron cane of the Queen of Women. When she emerges from the coma, the cane is on the bed next to her, and no one can tell her where it appeared from. “It is up to you to decide if it was a dream or if it was real,” she tells Ikirezi. But the conclusion that Sister Deborah comes to about divinity is not just one or the other; instead, she declares that the waiting and expectation that she herself planted in the women of Ikirezi’s village are the essence, for a spirit that will necessarily never come.

When the story is in Ikirezi’s hands, meanwhile, it flows briskly, but Ikirezi herself is not as much of a distinct character despite her central role. Her path is the reverse of Sister Deborah’s; some time after she is healed by Sister Deborah, she moves from Rwanda to the United States and becomes an academic in African Studies. She is drawn back to Africa for the purposes of her thesis when she hears of Sister Deborah resurfacing as Mama Nganga in Nairobi. The narrative swirls around her but Ikirezi is more of a reporter than a storyteller at times. “I sometimes wonder who I am: Ikirezi, the sickly little girl from Nyabikenke, or Miss Jewels, the eminent Africanist, heeded and esteemed by her peers?…I fear I have not yet reached the end of the path that has been traced for me.” Her identity gets overwhelmed by the stories she is relaying, and her commitment to Sister Deborah’s tale feels nebulous despite the vital impact that Sister Deborah had on her as a child.

Like the collapse of the cult and Sister Deborah’s disappearance, the novel grows toward an abrupt ending. In a hut in the periphery of a Nairobi shantytown, told that she can play a role not unlike Sister Deborah’s in the bringing of a woman messiah, Ikirezi makes the choice for herself to walk away from the stories and promises. She returns to America and to her work, but even then, as Sister Deborah perhaps predicted, she finds herself still waiting for that messiah. After all the events packed into a short book, moving between Rwanda and America, and heavy with violence and gospel, it is a simple, strange compulsion that the reader is left with.

Acta Victoriana would like to extend thanks to the publisher, Archipelago Books, for the review copy.