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Baking Cakes In Kigali
By: Gaile Parkin
2009, 308 p.
 
Angel Tungaraza may be menopausal and overweight, but she bakes beautiful cakes. Delicious, mouth-watering cakes, vibrantly coloured, and for any occasion. Angel and her husband Pius, a university professor, have moved from Tanzania to the multicultural Rwandan city of Kigali where they live in a large apartment complex with their five grandchildren. Still mourning the deaths of their daughter and son, and bound by their own secrets, the Tungarazas struggle to make ends meet.
Angel runs her cake business from the family home, dispensing comfort, advice, and wisdom, over cups of tea, to her multinational neighbours and customers. Wounds are still fresh only a few years after the 1994 genocide, but Angel’s compassion serves as a balm for those who stop by her kitchen to share their stories. Drawn from the voices of real women and the author’s time as a counsellor in Rwanda, Baking Cakes in Kigali, is funny, sad, thought-provoking but, most importantly, filled with hope.
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Gaile Parkin was born and raised in Zambia and studied at universities in South Africa and England. She has lived in many different parts of Africa, including Rwanda, where Baking Cakes in Kigali is set. She spent two years in Rwanda as a VSO volunteer at the new university doing a wide range of work: teaching, mentoring, writing learning materials, working with the campus clinic to counsel students with HIV/AIDS, and doing gender advocacy and empowerment work. Evenings and weekends, she counselled women and girls who were survivors. Many of the stories told by the characters in Baking Cakes for Kigali are based on or inspired by stories Parkin was told herself. She is currently a freelance consultant in the fields of education, gender, and HIV/AIDS. [from McClelland & Stewart].
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