Sparring Cultures

Canada has long been perceived as a haven for other countries’ political criminals. This has most recently been brought to light again in the wake of September 11, 2001, but it has been a point of international concern since the discovery of the first Nazi war criminals following World War II. Today, as new patterns of immigration emerge, the criminal sphere has expanded to include those from developing nations who partake in atrocities on their home turfs—such as Rwanda’s Desire Munyaneza, who participated in his country’s 1994 genocide of its Tutsi people before relocating to Toronto—and then enter Canada claiming fraudulent refugee status.

Randy Boyagoda’s Governor of the Northern Province is a novel about just such a case. Sam Bokarie flees the fictional country of Atwenty aboard a tanker bound for Newfoundland. After murdering a Liberian stowaway, he uses the man’s story to gain entrance and refugee status in Canada. When we first meet Bokarie, he is...