the eternal audience of one by rémy ngamije

The story doesn’t revolve around a main character who migrates to Europe or the United States instead, it destabilises that common narrative by focusing on an African that migrates from East Africa to southern Africa.įor Ngamije, the experience and concept of migration is far more expansive than the narrow passage from the Global South to the Global North. The Eternal Audience of One is an important contribution to the African canon of migrant literature because the narrative upends one of its most prevalent tropes.

Migrant groups act in social solidarity.

One of Ngamije’s concluding remarks during the launch encapsulated the lifeblood of the novel: “I’ve always gravitated towards stories of how people experience elsewhere.” Related article: The Time of the Writer festival, which had been scheduled to start on 16 March at the Ekhaya Multi-Arts Centre in KwaMashu, Durban, took place online instead. On the eve of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s declaration of the national lockdown in response to Covid-19, Ngamije went live on Facebook in the kitchen of his Windhoek home to launch the book. In an epic spanning just over 500 pages and six countries, the Rwandan-born Namibian author takes readers on a narrative journey in a story about family, friendship and migration. The Eternal Audience of One by Rémy Ngamije is a transportive novel.

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Whether he ever finds rest and truly comes to know himself is up to the reader to decide. His relationships with women become markers of the passing of time and lessons learnt and provide insight into who he is and who he wants to be. The themes of movement or displacement, life as an immigrant or refugee and the life of a black youth are neatly unpacked. Through his interactions with a few reluctant mentors, loyal friends and the women he carries on relationships with, he explores and performs different parts of his identity while dealing with other issues of family, race, immigrant life and love.Seraphin and his pursuit and struggle for inner peace and identity effortlessly meld together geography, history and how one’s experience of a place can be perceived as a relatable journey. So much about the city is designed to push people like him out. After leaving Rwanda under duress and never feeling at rest in Namibia, which he believes is slow and boring, he finds himself fighting to fit in in Cape Town.

Seraphin Turihamwe is a young man whose life is characterised by movement.

The eternal audience of one by rémy ngamije