The best known books set in each country: Burundi

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Burundi.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Small Country	Gaël Faye	28,162	682
Baho!	Roland Rugero	150	37
The True Sources of the Nile	Sarah Stone	101	44
The Night the Angels Came: Miracles Of Protection And Provision In Burundi	Chrissie Chapman	137	19
The Tears of a Man Flow Inward: Growing Up in the Civil War in Burundi	Pacifique Irankunda	171	10
Life after Violence: A People’s Story of Burundi	Peter Uvin	60	22
Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide	René Lemarchand	30	31
From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi: Our Embassy Years during Genocide	Robert Krueger	36	19

This week’s winner is by Gaël Faye, who identifies himself as French-Rwandan, though in fact he grew up in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, and Small Country reflects his experiences there (though we are warned not to take it as autobiography).

I cannot remember a case where there was such a big gap between the winner and the rest of the field.

Roland Rugero, the author of this week’s runner-up, does identify as Burundian, and Baho! is set in a fictional Burundian village. The top book set in Burundi by a women from Burundi is Weep Not, Refugee, by Marie-Therese Toyi.

I was not sure about the setting of The True Sources of the Nile, by Sarah Stone, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt. I also looked closely at The Chimpanzee Whisperer, by Stany Nyandwi, and in the end decided that probably less than half of it is set in the author’s homeland of Burundi.

I disqualified dozens of books here. There is a huge number of books which have been given the ‘Burundi’ tag on either Goodreads, LibraryThing or both, but have less than 50% (usually much less than 50%) set there.

There is for two slightly different reasons. The first is that there are a lot of books about Africa, or Central Africa, that touch on Burundi but only as a minor element of a bigger picture. The second is that Burundi’s awful conflict of the 1990s tends to get lumped in with the even more awful conflict in Rwanda next door, which usually gets top billing. Even Small Country, this week’s winner, has a Rwandan protagonist.

Also I noted Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder, last week as a book which is more about Burundi than Rwanda. This is true, but it is mainly set in the USA.

Next week we move away from Africa, to Bolivia, and then back again to Tunisia and South Sudan, but they will be the last African countries for a while; in four weeks time we come to Haiti.

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The best known books set in each country: Burundi

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