Baking Cakes in Kigali
by Gaile Parkin, 2009
This book has already been discussed and reviewed very
extensively. It is a good read, convincingly written so that you can, or
imagine you can, hear the Tanzanians and Rwandans speaking. It invites
comparisons with Alexander McCall Smith’s Number
One Ladies’ Detective Agency books, but is in a way much more serious,
being set in post-genocide Kigali, with the multiple problems of “truth and
justice”, Aids, malaria, orphaned street-children, and more.
A very telling aspect is how the various characters work
together to rebuild Rwanda, at a very local and personal level.
Angel, the central figure, makes cakes to order. Each
chapter is broadly built around a different cake, and the Cake Order Form, is one
of the devices that unite the narrative into a whole. Angel also has a habit of
polishing her glasses when she needs time to think; and making hot steaming
mugs of sweet, spicy tea.
Parkin clearly draws very extensively on her own experience
as an HIV-Aids counsellor in Kigali. What is conspicuous by its absence is any
coherent notion of marriage or of the value of morality, continence, chastity
or faithfulness. In the many incidents and discussions in the book which touch
on weddings, marriage, and couples, there is no understanding of marriage and
love as self-giving.
Certainly, Angel and Pius are faithfully married, and Angel
refers with deep disapproval to the way a young woman called Linda dresses:
“she had never seen a man look at Linda’s face; there were always other parts
of her body that were asking more urgently to be observed.” Angel has good
values, but does not reflect on them. She and Pius are Catholics, but they know
that some Catholics, even nuns and priests, took part in the killing in 1994.
“In Rwanda we’re simply Christians. I’m nervous of attending just one church
here, of listening to just one priest. Because how can we know what is truly in
that priest’s heart after so many showed that love and peace were only words in
their mouths? So we attend a different church every second week; in between, we
still attend our local Catholic church” (p.85).
At the very start of the book, Angel explains that when she
and her husband got married (they are now grandparents), they were “pioneers”
of contraception, and were careful to have only two children “so that we could
afford to educate them well.” In the event, their children, having had children
of their own, both lost their respective spouses and died before the start of
the book, and Angel and her husband Pius are now starting all over again, bringing
up their five grandchildren as their own children. The book does not point the
moral, but it is actually a clear instance of how wrong-headed it is to
contracept in order to have fewer children and hence more money.
A fairly important figure in the book is Jeanne d’Arc, who,
having been orphaned and gang-raped during the genocide at the age of eleven,
has been a prostitute for the past seven years in order to support herself, her
two sisters, and a small boy they found abandoned. Angel is able to help Jeanne
d’Arc in many different ways, finally putting her in touch with someone who can
teach her to sew to be able to earn her living in a “safer” way. But, at the
same time, she jokes with someone else about Jeanne d’Arc and her “business”.
Perhaps she develops more compassion for Jeanne d’Arc in the course of the
book.
Angel is able to help people in many ways in the course of
her business. One often has the impression that the author had a list of themes
she wanted to bring in, and worked through them – FGM, the mayibobo (street children), truthfulness to oneself and to others,
Catholicism in Rwanda – chapter by chapter, through the book.
Overall it is a good read, ideal for provoking enjoyable
discussions, which need to take each theme a lot deeper, with a lot more
informed input, than the book itself is able to do.
