4 ideas
At the lycée of Our Lady of the Nile, the statue of a black Virgin has a slender nose that Gloriosa, a Hutu pupil and daughter of a powerful politician, reads as a Tutsi feature. She sets out to replace it with a Hutu nose, damages the statue, and turns the incident into a pretext for accusing and purging the Tutsi pupils. The episode escalates into a 1973 pogrom at the school that the Tutsi girls must flee.
The lycée admits Tutsi girls only under a fixed quota, so ethnicity becomes an official, countable category governing who belongs and who is merely tolerated. By formalizing the division in admissions, the institution teaches its pupils to see each other first as ethnic tokens. The school sorts and ranks people before the state's violence does the same thing on a national scale.
Monsieur de Fontenaille, a white planter obsessed with the myth that Tutsi descend from ancient Egyptians, paints the Tutsi pupil Veronica as the goddess Isis and builds a shrine around her. His admiration is the same racial theory the Hutu elite use to cast Tutsi as foreign invaders. Veronica is killed, which shows how exoticizing praise marks its object for destruction.
The daughters of the ruling class import their fathers' ideology and power into the closed world of the school. There they practise in miniature the denunciations, rituals of loyalty and persecutions of the adult regime. Adult authorities such as priests and teachers accommodate them instead of restraining them. The genocide is shown to be learned and rehearsed years in advance inside respectable institutions.