Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron: book review

Running the Rift (2011) is set in Rwanda, in the Rift Valley of eastern Africa, covering 10 years from the mid-1980s to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The rift also represents the schisms between ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi, and the separation of a young boy from his family, and evenually his country.

Jean Patrick Nkuba lives in Rwanda, the land of a thousand hills. He is nine years old, and his brother Roger is eleven, when their father, the headmaster of his school, dies in a vehicle accident.

At the same time, Rwandan Olympic marathon runner, Telesphore Dusabe, visits their primary school. From that day on, Jean-Patrick wants to be an Olympic runner – he wants to be Rwanda’s first short-distance track Olympian.

He has a major challenge – he is Tutsi in a time of Hutu-Tutsi tensions, and no neighbour, friend, girlfriend, or running coach can be totally trusted.

Jean Patrick’s coach, Rutembeza, with his eyes on the Atlanta Olympics for his hopeful cadet, needs Jean Patrick to trust him and do as he is told. For running is not just about running – it is about training, and pace, and tactics, and psychology, and health, and faith, and trusting your coach. This novel is primarily about the Jean Patrick’s sole focus in life – to run. To win. To be number one. It is his strength and his weakness.

When Rwanda’s president Juvenal Habyarimana dies in a plane crash in April 1994, the Tutsis are accused of his assassination. Hutu extremists kill hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and Hutu sympathizers over the next 100 days – it is the Rwandan genocide. Jean Patrick must run for his life.

The novel is structured in five parts: (1) Yesterday, (2) A Bird Builds its Nest, (3) Death Becomes Hungry, (4) The Far Side of the Earth, and (5) The Things of Tomorrow. About three-quarters of the novel is the building of a dream, and the last quarter is the violence and rift.

This is a great story of a boy’s dream and the dedication it takes, in a country divided, a country of violence and brutal killings, when everything he has in life must be left behind.

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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