The Eternal Audience of One by Rémy Ngamije

For this week’s review, I thought I would revisit one of my favorite authors, Rémy Ngamije, the Rwandan-born Namibian author whose short stories have been shortlisted for the Caine Prize, and won the Africa Regional Prize of the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, among other awards. He is also the editor-in-chief of Doek! Literary Magazine. His debut novel The Eternal Audience of One was published by Scout Press in 2021.

We enter Séraphin Turihamwe’s world on his return from university in Cape Town to his home in Windhoek for New Year’s eve. A child of Rwandan immigrants, Séraphin navigates a complicated dance where he plays part host to fellow Rwandans in their home. The Séraphin at the beginning of the novel acquiesces to his parents’ expectations of a professional career in law. His parents were forced to leave an upwardly mobile life in Kigali for Nairobi, Kenya, and later Windhoek in Namibia. As immigrants in Namibia, the group of Rwandan parents shrink themselves in order to fit in and to continue living at the mercy of home affairs officials by attaining more qualifications and working harder than their workmates. While their parents reminisce about Rwanda, the children have very little in common and mostly ask polite questions of each other as they sit in a separate room. They are Namibians who straddle the difficult middle that second-generation immigrants often face - faded memories of the past while being viewed as foreigners in their adopted land.

The eldest of three boys, Séraphin, is a final year law student at a university in Cape Town. He won a generous scholarship which afforded him the opportunity to study English for his first degree. His brothers are not so fortunate, due to close family friends absconding with their parents’ savings, the younger boys attend a local university adding more pressure on Séraphin to succeed. He returns to Cape Town still unsure of what he will do after graduation.

Ngamije weaves the history of Séraphin’s parents as students in Paris and Belgium, their return to a middle-class life in Kigali and their subsequent escape from Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. Interspersed between this history is a cast of characters which include Séraphin’s friends from Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. They are black, white, and mixed young men and a young woman who is accepted into the group they call “The High Lords of Empireland”. Ngamije captures the individual characteristics of the group of friends and as people influenced by their cultural and national histories. For instance, the two optimistic Zimbabweans in the group Richard (who is white) and Godwin (who is black) plan on returning to rebuild a country struggling from an economic downturn. In contrast the Nigerian, Adewale, a Ph.D., student prolongs his stay in South Africa through applications for various grants, in order to avoid a return to his country which he feels holds no future for him.

Ngamije seamlessly writes about new characters in new chapters as if the reader already knows them before a formal introduction is provided. They are a motley crew of South Africans and immigrants from varied social classes, who surround an increasingly worldly Séraphin. That Séraphin occasionally talks to different parts of himself through several Séraphins, seems a natural part of the novel that moves from omniscient to close third without missing a beat. It’s a clever way of showing the conflicted young man who holds council meetings with his inner voices in order to make major decisions that could alter the trajectory of his life.

Cape Town as a backdrop for this novel, is ideal as it provides the cultural intrigue which Séraphin says is lacking in Windhoek. It is also a place where racial politics play an outsize role in the students’ lives a decade after South Africa’s independence from white minority rule. Through his friendships and music, which spans decades and genres, he leaves the smallness of Windhoek behind as his world expands in the new city. Séraphin’s romantic relationships expose a young man who is unsure of himself, who clings to women and tosses them aside once his needs have been met. It is a coming-of-age story of a new generation of educated Africans whose trivial concerns of where to go clubbing and competing in a board game, is a breath of fresh air from African tales that sometimes carry the weight of a continent’s history.

Ngamije’s humor and observation of life is mature in a debut author, it heralds a new voice that will be read for years to come.