Lightweight confection

~ Baking cakes in Kigali, by Gaile Parkin ~

Set squarely in Mma Ramotswe territory is Gaile Parkin’s Baking Cakes in Kigali, featuring a plump entrepreneurial African woman who solves human problems along with the cakes she sells.

There are some differences, of course: the protagonist in Kigali is Angel Tungaraza, who is from Tanzania, and the novel is set in a modern post-genocide Rwanda rather than the Botswana of Alexander McCall Smith’s books. Angel lives in an apartment building for expats, which includes people who work for the UN and other aid organizations. Based in Kigali due to her husband’s academic job, and needing additional income, Angel bakes cakes — stupendous, creative masterpieces that do so much more than just provide food for a party. Each chapter involves a character who commissions a cake, upon which Angel probes gently and is told more about the person and their background, and then the underlying problem is solved along with the cake.

Given the locale and time, the topics can get quite intense. Jeanne d’Arc is a prostitute who was raped during the Rwandan civil war and ‘spoiled’: she now sells her body to help her two younger sisters avoid a life of prostitution. Leocadie (who runs the nearby store) has a baby with Modeste (the compound guard), but he also has another girlfriend who is also pregnant. To add to the complication, Leocadie and Modeste are Hutu and Tutsi respectively, and Leocadie’s mother is in prison, accused of being a genocidaire. Odile is a victim of female genital mutilation and also a genocide survivor. There is a crazy soldier, little more than a child, who randomly decides to marry this woman or that, and has to be treated very carefully given his manic behaviour and his armament.

Angel’s own family life is not simple either. She and her husband Pius (who is written as the thoughtful one, discussing issues of revenge and reconciliation over dinner) live with and support five grandchildren, because both their children (the parents of the five grandchildren) are ‘late’. Both son and daughter, it turns out, had AIDS, and though Angel and Pius were aware of this, it is carefully kept from everyone else, and the secret weighs on both of them.

Despite these grim themes, the tone of the book is peaceful. Angel reacts to the horrific life stories of her customers with tranquilizing serenity.

Angel shook her head and clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth. “You are strong, Odile. And your brother is strong too.”

Parkin strives mightily to write in a personality for Angel, but ends up with a series of tics. Angel “changes out of her tight clothes and gets into a comfortable Tshirt and kanga”. Angel “takes off her glasses and begins to polish them with the corner of her kanga” (overloaded metaphor for seeing the problem clearly). Angel makes tea with cardamom. Angel keeps tissues tucked into her brassiere. Angel also keeps all her money inside her brassiere. Angel has hot flashes reliably every chapter. A few mentions of these traits would have been sufficient, but they are reiterated unimaginatively in almost every chapter.

Several non-African expats buy cakes from Angel, and they are almost all pretty unpleasant. There is Rob — “officially working for an American aid organization, but it was well known he really worked for the CIA”, along with his wife Jenna, who Rob never allows to leave the compound for “her own safety”. There is Linda, the British human rights monitor who dresses in tiny skirts and low tops, in a country where “women are modest”. There is Ken from America, who has noisy wild karaoke parties. There is the Canadian who cheats the poor prostitute out of her earned pay. The Indian mother is paranoid about safety and ‘germs’.

Only the two women volunteer teachers, Sophie and Catherine, are nice, open-minded people. Coincidentally, the author’s own background is as a white volunteer aid worker. (For those who are curious, the author was born and brought up in Zambia).

The Africans are described with sympathy throughout, and the author is very careful to avoid condemnation of any cultural practices. Modeste needs to decide which of his two child-bearing girlfriends to marry, and decides it will depend on whether the second girlfriend has a baby girl (thumbs down) or boy (thumbs up). Angel promptly throws a huge wedding party for the successful girl, with no concern for the other abandoned girlfriend with her infant.

After Sophie is shocked at the anti-feminism of the ‘bride price’:

[Angel] thought about what Catherine and Sophie had said about bride-price. She had never felt that Pius bought her — or her womb, or her labour — in any way. He had merely approached her parents in the traditional, respectful way to ask for her hand in marriage, and he had compensated them for the expenses that they had incurred in raising her. […] Angel felt that they would be glad if their three grandsons grew up to be more modern; they could certainly not afford high sums to be negotiated for the wives of three more boys.

Angel is African and therefore an insider, but she is Tanzanian and therefore has an outsider’s view into Rwanda. Although the author attempts to write the book entirely from Angel’s perspective, she is not entirely successful: there are lengthy descriptions of hair braiding, grasshopper cooking, and streetside shops that surely Angel would take for granted.

Most problems are solved with a paragraph of conversation, such as:

When she suicided herself, did she not save her parents the pain of watching her suffer? Did she not save her children from the pain of watching her die? I think that when a person dies to save others, Hell is not the place for her soul. I think the Bible tells us that such a soul belongs in Heaven.

Each reader can decide for themselves whether this is simplistic and trite, or whether such simple heartfelt advice can take a weight off someone’s mind. And if you’re in the latter camp, there are already two more books in the series.