by Imbolo Mbue
Woja Beki’s first wife looked at her son and asked him to go find out what was happening. Gono went outside. He remained outside with the Cute One. From the silence, it appeared they’d gone to another part of the building. We waited for over an hour. When they returned, Gono read to us what the government had written in the letter:
We wish to inform you that the four accused were hanged to death earlier this week for the kidnapping of four employees of the Pexton Corporation and for the death of one of the employees, Kumbum Owawe, and for their complicity in the murder of four soldiers of the republic. Our fair and balanced team of judges, representing the people of our country, deliberated for hours after listening to all witnesses, including the kidnap victims and the accused, before finding the accused guilty of kidnapping and murder and accessory to murder. The judges concluded that the accused did what they did in an attempt to extort money from the Pexton Corporation, a corporation that has done nothing but bring opportunities to the village of the accused and our country. The judges determined that the accused must pay for their crimes, for all those who seek to hurt the republic must be made to pay a price. They were hanged after they’d each made a statement asking Pexton and the people of our country for forgiveness. They asked that their families learn from their mistakes and choose to live wisely. Because of their ignoble deeds and death, they were buried in a shared grave in a location we wish not to disclose. We hope you will learn from their lives and go forth and live in peace.
The Children
We were paralyzed, ground to bits finer than dust. When the bus returned from Bézam that day with the news that we had little left with which to fight, our bravest having been dumped in one grave, we knelt and banged the earth. We begged the Spirit to forgive our growing doubt of its existence, for though we had seen proof of its supremacy, we’d also seen evidence of its weakness, and we couldn’t reconcile this, its inability to do no more than stand by and watch them destroy us. We had no Sakani for guidance, no one to help us comprehend what we were living through, so we crawled from one day to the next, too weakened to rise. How could we have been so reckless as to dream? Why did we for so long refuse to lie prostrate before the inevitable? Because we carry the blood of men who stood on a land between two rivers and received it from the Spirit? Because they told themselves that this land was theirs, to be passed to their children and their children’s children, generation after generation? If our forefathers had known of the oil beneath their feet, would they have so gladly bequeathed it to us? They thought we’d never know such degradation, because we carry the blood of the leopard, but if they had seen the extent of our enemies’ powers, their beliefs would have turned to ashes.
* * *
In the early months of the Four’s imprisonment, the Restoration Movement had gone to dozens of newspapers across America with our story. Some of the newspapers sent men from Bézam to take pictures and ask us more questions about what we had endured at the hands of His Excellency’s government and Pexton. Every time the Sweet One and the Cute One visited, they assured us that we had growing multitudes of supporters across the ocean. They showed us pictures of people in America shaking their fists in front of the office of Pexton. People all over America wrote letters to Pexton, begging for the Four to be released. Pexton told them that they had nothing to do with the men’s arrest, it was up to His Excellency. The American people asked their leaders to speak to His Excellency, to threaten him if necessary, to say they would no longer help his government in times of crisis, they would eject him from groups he ought to belong in, they would punish our country so severely a recovery would be years-long. The American leaders said these things and more, and leaders the world over said the same, because people in their countries wanted no association with evil. Corporations in Europe that often gave His Excellency loans to create shared wealth told him that if he didn’t release the Four they’d stop lending to him, they couldn’t condone the unjust treatment of any human, but everyone knew that these lenders wouldn’t stop making the loans—keeping countries like ours in their debt was why they existed. That is why His Excellency had laughed at their threats. He’d proceeded to show the European and American people how irrelevant their opinions were to him, for on the day he decided to hang the Four, he’d done exactly as he wished. Pexton had condemned what he’d done, and governments worldwide had done the same, but His Excellency had merely laughed some more and told Pexton that if they were so disappointed with him they could leave his country. But Pexton couldn’t leave. There was still so much oil under our land—why abandon it because of a conscience?
* * *
—
Our village took the money Pexton gave as a token of solidarity, though, simultaneously, we cursed everyone who worked there. Alas, our curses can only harm those with whom we share blood, so no harm ever befell our foes because of the words of our mouths.
Indignant as our parents were, when the Restoration Movement began sending a school bus that Pexton had purchased as a gift to us—the Restoration Movement paid for the driver and the maintenance of the bus—they put us on it. In that first year, only a few of us went; most of our parents were distrustful. By the time the school year ended and none of us had been killed in Lokunja, more parents began putting children on the bus. Before long, the Restoration Movement needed to use its own funds to buy another bus, because all the parents wanted their sons over twelve to go to the school in Lokunja.
* * *
We knew the day was bound to come when our bonds as age-mates would start to fray, and we’d depend less on each other for friendship. We’d seen it happen to age-mates born before us. We’d noticed our older siblings’ circles of age-mates dwindle when the girls’ bodies started showing signs of womanhood, leading them to prefer the company of young men capable of giving them things their boy age-mates didn’t yet have. By the time most children in Kosawa got to eleven or twelve, they’d decided that a shared birth year need not be the paramount basis for mutual closeness, leading to a rise in friendships with older adolescents. That is what happened to us when the boys continued going to school while the girls stayed home. The girls began spending more time with older girls and women: going to the farm, doing laundry, going to the market, taking care of babies, gossiping in kitchens. The boys went to school and spent their evenings hunting or playing football. Thus, it so happened that even before the end of our second year of taking the bus to Lokunja, we were no longer a pack of boy and girl age-mates traversing life together—just seven boys who got together often to do homework, and Thula.
* * *
—
By fifteen, three of our girl age-mates, all of them Thula’s good friends, had found husbands. The girls who hadn’t yet done so were attending every wedding they could in every village, hair braided and faces painted, hoping to meet a man in search of a wife, marriage celebrations being better than any other place in stirring within the unattached a longing to be lonesome no more. One of our age-mates became the woman of a soldier in Lokunja and moved into his house, which hurt and betrayed us, but the girl hadn’t been blessed with sense to begin with. We tried not to speak ill of her, because we all needed to find love and move on to the next phase in life, hardships aside. Fate hadn’t given us numerous chances to be children, but we’d grabbed every occasion we could; though now, as we went further into maturity, few traces of our childish ways remained. Still, no matter how far behind the past was, we saw its face with clarity even when we weren’t looking for it. We couldn’t speak of the future without segueing into a lament for the bygone days of our ancestors, those simpler days the likes of which we feared we might never see.
One of our age-mates had died in the massacre, when a bullet turned her years of daydreaming about a wedding day into a vile joke. Two of our age-mates died a few years later—one from the years of the poison that had accumulated in his belly, causing it to swell so high he looked like a pregnant woman on the brink o
f birthing, and the other in an accident, when the bus he had taken from Gardens swerved off its path and shattered against a tree. Though three laborers had also died in that accident, we had cursed Pexton as we dug our friend’s grave—how could we separate anything happening to us from what they were doing to us?
Several of our age-mates left Kosawa in our mid-adolescent years, forced to bid their friends and cousins farewell by parents who had once sworn that they would never surrender to the gas flares and oil spills. One of our age-mates needed to leave the village because of a condition that caused her monthly bleeding to last for weeks, accompanied by blood clots and backaches and severe cramps. This friend had followed all the directions the womb doctor gave her and drunk the prescribed herbs, but relief never came. In the absence of Jakani and Sakani, she had no choice but to leave Kosawa in search of a cure. Other friends of ours had to move to new villages because a father had died and a mother deemed it best to live among her people, or a mother had buried more than one child and knew that the burial of another would be more than she could endure.
In their new villages, our friends crammed into the huts of relatives, sleeping on their floors, or in back rooms that had been vacated by married sons who had decided that it would be better to build new huts and keep their wives and mothers in different corners of the village. Our friends lived like vagrants until one relative or another gave them a piece of land on the village’s periphery. There, they built huts that they worried would never be filled with the warmth of the ones they’d left behind in Kosawa.
Whenever they visited Kosawa, our escaped friends looked around wistfully at all that was once theirs. But when one of us talked about how the smoke blowing from Gardens seemed blacker than ever the other day, or when we sighed about how the amount of bottled water Pexton was sending for the babies was not enough, and how some babies still drank boiled well water, we saw our age-mates’ yearning for home dissipate like dew. Sometimes they took some of the empty plastic water bottles with them, to serve as fuel for their fire—something we also did—or to bring their own drinking water upon subsequent visits.
Their gratitude for the hills between us was evident, the separation of our suffering from their new serenity. But nothing Pexton did could compel the parents of the rest of us to leave Kosawa. Most huts in Kosawa remained full and boisterous, and young women from other villages continued marrying Kosawa men and moving here to add to our numbers. Now that we were getting closer to manhood, we could have left of our own accord, we could have fled for a poison-free life, but we were determined never to give up our land, not then or ever, and the Restoration Movement and Sonni reminded us of this, that it was our land, come rainy season or dry season, it would always be ours.
* * *
Sonni was not supposed to be our new village head. Woja Beki’s firstborn son, Gono, had been next in line. If Gono did not want the role, any of his brothers could have taken it, but none of them wanted it—after learning about what our fathers had done to their father, none of Woja Beki’s sons wanted to ever breathe Kosawa’s air again, or concern themselves with whatever might befall us. After the hanging, Gono made a final trip to Kosawa to pack up his family’s things and take his two youngest full siblings. Exactly how he was going to fend for them and his own family in Bézam, being that he no longer had a job at Pexton, we would never know, but we had better things to do than occupy ourselves with that. The women of Kosawa, however, made it their concern. They analyzed the family’s situation from every angle and decided that Woja Beki must have given Gono some of his money to hide, which meant that the family was never going to lack, thanks to the government’s and Pexton’s money.
Gono moved everything from inside his father’s brick house into the truck he had arrived in, everything from his father’s bed and rug and clock, to his mother’s mortar and pestle. All he left for his father’s second wife was the house itself, nearly bare but still grand. Woja Beki’s second wife, in her inherited house, had shed no tears—her co-wives and their children were gone; her children would now all have their own bedrooms in a brick house. We suspected that the woman knew—she had to know—that the day was bound to come when one of Woja Beki’s older sons would return to take back the house; that family had never been known to be givers. Still, as we watched Gono leave in the loaded truck, we knew that the family would be gone from our lives for a long time. Indeed, it was so. None of them returned to Kosawa for the death celebration of the Four.
* * *
—
Though we did not know the date of the Four’s deaths, we celebrated it at a three-month mark, and also a year after, using the date on which the courthouse guard had delivered the letter. We celebrated with the hope that the Spirit would not frown upon us for picking a date that, though not arbitrary, was far from precise, and nowhere in line with the exactness we needed to apply to ensure that the departed arrived safely in the next world. As we offered prayers to the ancestors on their behalf on the three mornings leading to the celebration—at the sound of the rooster’s crow, kneeling in the parlor with our families if any of the men were our immediate kin, otherwise sitting alone on our beds or mats; eyes closed, our palms on our chests—we tried not to imagine how arduous their journeys would be, after having been tied by their necks and left to choke and dangle, then tossed into a pit, one body atop another, all still in prison garb, none of the bodies washed, their spirits forced to travel to the new world with the filth of the old.
For the first celebration we killed four goats and four pigs and sixteen chickens, as per the Spirit’s dictate. We dressed in white, and wore no shoes. A medium from one of the sibling-villages poured libations and we softly played the drums, wishing the men the peace this world couldn’t give them, a peace we would find when we joined them.
After this three-month celebration was when we made Sonni our new head.
One of our grandfathers, Pondo, had wanted to become village head. He said that, having been a counselor to Bongo and Lusaka, and also being a relative by marriage of Woja Beki, he knew what the slain men would have done if others had been hanged and they’d been left to create something out of our loss. Pondo said he could imagine the ways in which Lusaka and Bongo would have worked with the Restoration Movement to keep aflame the anger of the American people so our story would not be forgotten there. Manga, another one of our grandfathers, had stood up and reminded everyone gathered that he too had been a counselor, and that on the day of the massacre he had coordinated the carrying of the dead to their huts and made sure every corpse had a coffin. Manga argued that his son Sonni had no less wisdom and calmness than he did, and thus should be our new leader. Even more, he added, Sonni had the right to the position, given that he was first cousins with Bongo. With Bongo dead and having left no son or brother, and with Sonni the oldest male of all Bongo’s cousins, the inheritance of Bongo’s position should be his; Bongo wouldn’t disagree if he were present, considering how much he admired Sonni.
We hadn’t been allowed at the meeting where Bongo was anointed leader, but our fathers allowed us to attend the deliberations on who would be Bongo’s successor, even though we were only a year older. They agreed that we were old enough, not in years, certainly, but in what we’d seen, for we had seen far more than our lifetimes were capable of digesting. Still, on that late evening, when the men gathered under the mango tree to talk about the way forward, we only listened, for we weren’t deemed wise enough to contribute—we still had at least two more years before we would begin our entrance into the age of wisdom.
We watched as Pondo and Manga argued, and then as our fathers began taking sides because they shared a stronger blood relation with one man or the other. In the end, all the men agreed that arguments and side-takings would never give us a new village head. They resolved to come back three evenings later to declare whom they each wanted—whoever the most men wanted would be our new woja.
Such a thing had never happened since our ancestors arrived here—blood was the only means by which power was transferred—but we also knew that many things had not come to pass for us the way our ancestors had imagined, so, when the evening for the declarations came, the men who wanted Pondo to be their leader arrived with twigs, and the men who wanted Sonni arrived with stones. When they’d put it all down and counted it in the sight of the assembly, the number of stones was found to be more than the number of twigs, and so Sonni became our new head.
Pondo said no more on the matter, not even when gossip began leaping from hut to hut about how Manga and Sonni had visited some men late at night to convince them that Pondo was too old to lead us. Pondo was realizing, perhaps, that the village now belonged to the young, the old would soon depart, why argue against that? But if the Spirit were to be merciful, he might live long enough to see the day of our restoration.
* * *
We spoke about it daily, from the time we were seventeen, about the day we would repay Pexton in full. On verandas and in the village square and on our way to the forest, we spoke of what we would do to the Pexton people. What we would do to His Excellency. We fantasized about burning down buildings at Gardens, killing laborers, acquiring guns and going to Bézam and killing high-level government people. Such thoughts soothed us, the mere idea that we could make them fear us. We kept these fantasies to ourselves, for, though our heartache was no greater than everyone else’s, we knew that, unlike us, our families and friends were clinging to the idea that there was no virtue in hurting our enemies. The massacre had so broken the village that Sonni and the elders had decided that our only recourse was to leave ourselves in the hands of the Restoration Movement, believe them when they said that they’d never cease fighting for us. Sonni repeated this during meetings, that help was on the way. But we didn’t want to wait for kindly Americans. We doubted that their hatred for Pexton burned as fiercely as ours did.