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for anything in the world.
    Mother Superior bombarded the ministry with desperate letters. The French teacher’s shamefully long hair was a threat to every moral, both civic and Christian, and imperiled the future ofRwanda’s female elite. The Minister wrote an embarrassed letter to the French ambassador and his cultural Attaché, who returned to the lycée and threatened Mr. Hair. In vain. Despite the close surveillance placed on his bungalow, the lycée girls came and hovered around it. Whenever there was a sunny spell, he was often seen drying his long, golden curls outside after a shampoo. Some girls even dared to gesture and call to him from afar: “Kanyarushatsi! Kanyarushatsi!” The lycée staff eventually lost heart and allowed him into the classroom. They needed a math teacher. Yet the pupils were very disappointed with his performance. In class, he never budged from his equations. He was actually quite similar to Monsieur Van der Putten, except that when he turned around to write on the blackboard, the girls gazed, enraptured, at his long flowing mane. When Kanyarushatsi left the room at the end of class, the most shameless of the seniors swarmed about him and, under the pretext of asking him questions about elements they hadn’t understood, tried to touch his hair. He answered as quickly as he could, without daring to look at the cluster of insistent young women jostling him. He finally managed to extricate himself from this pack of purportedly curious girls, striding off down the hallway to escape them.
    At the end of the year he was sent back to France. “We were mere tenth graders then,” said a regretful Immaculée, “but if he were still around, I’d know just how to tame him now.”
    “They haven’t touched a thing, again,” bemoaned Sister Bénigne, assigned to the kitchen to help old Sister Kizito, whose hands trembled and who needed two canes to walk. “The dishes come back half eaten. Are they scared I’ll poison them? Do they take me for a poisoner? I’d really like to know who put that into their heads! Is it because I’m from Gisaka?”
    “Don’t you worry now,” said Sister Kizito in a reassuring voice. “You’ll see, Gisaka or no Gisaka, this time next week their suitcases will be empty, and whether they like your cooking or not, they’ll be forced to eat it. They’ll lick the plates clean.”
    Before returning their daughters to school, the girls’ mothers had indeed filled their suitcases with the most delectable food a Rwandan mother could imagine and prepare.
    “They make them eat nothing but white people’s food at the lycée,” they’d say. “Unfit for Rwandans, especially young women – some say it could make them infertile.”
    So suitcases became well-stocked pantries filled by doting mothers: beans and cassava paste, with a special sauce, in little enameled containers decorated with large flowers and wrapped in a piece of cloth; bananas slowly baked overnight; ibisheke , sugarcane you chew and chew until the pure fibrous marrow fills your mouth with its sweet juice; red gahungezi sweet potatoes; corncobs; peanuts; and even, for the city girls, doughnuts of every color under the sun – a secret Swahili recipe – avocados you can only buy at Kigali markets, and extra-salty, red-roasted peanuts.
    At night, as soon as the monitor had left the dorm, the feast began. The suitcases were opened, and all the victuals laid out on the beds. One of the girls would check that the monitor was fast asleep, but some of the monitors, like Sister Rita, weren’t fools and were quite willing to be corrupted in order to join the banquet. An assessment was made of everyone’s provisions, and it was decided what should be eaten first, before the evening’s menu was planned. Any selfish, greedy girl who tried to keep a little of her pantry for herself, and deprive the communal banquet, was roundly condemned.
    Alas! The supplies soon ran out, and after two or three weeks there was