How Beautiful We Were

by Imbolo Mbue

  You should have seen how hard my father and the other men of Kosawa laughed after that meeting. This wasn’t the first time they’d listened to such talk, but it never ceased to tickle them. They laughed even harder whenever news reached us of how someone we knew in another village had chosen the Spirit of the European men after considering what life in the fire would be like—no water to drink, everyone crying, no one sleeping. One relative, desperate to avoid these European flames, had thrown his family’s umbilical-cord bundle into a fire, believing its power to be false, convinced that the only true power in the world rested with men from Europe and their Spirit. Though the likes of him were few, it revealed to me even then the fickleness of the heart of man.

  I remember my father and his brother wiping their eyes after a long laugh. They couldn’t understand how any man whose head bore a large enough brain could believe such nonsense as an everlasting fire. But they wouldn’t have laughed if they’d recalled that, for generations, a different sort of fire had been burning down our way of life.

  * * *

  Kosawa was spared when men began arriving from the coast looking for humans to snatch and sell, but we should have known we wouldn’t always be spared calamities coming from afar. The snatchers came generations before I was born. My grandmother told me about them—the story had been passed down to her of the time when men and women from distant villages appeared in Kosawa bloodied and in tears, bearing accounts of how young and old alike had been thrown into chains. The sick had been left behind to die alone, babies flung on the ground so their mothers could be dragged away with warm milk flowing down from their breasts. Those who had escaped had run for countless days before stumbling into Kosawa, their clothes turned to rags. Many more of them made it to one of our sibling-villages. Still in shock, they told our ancestors that they ought to be prepared—Kosawa or one of the sibling-villages was bound to be next.

  Our ancestors fed the escapees, and allowed them to make a home among us; their descendants live in our midst to this day, though their blood has long since been diluted by ours. From what my grandmother told me, our ancestors sharpened their spears and created flight paths in the forest. They told their children what to do if the time did come. But the snatchers never arrived. Still, the fear of it happening remained across the eight villages. With every arrival of a new group of escapees presenting stories of villages emptied out by snatchers, our ancestors made more spears and machetes, though the escapees told them that such weapons would be of no use, the snatchers had a thing that spat fire and could fell a man with one click. Even after new escapees stopped arriving, men rarely went alone into the forest to hunt. Mothers told their children to be good boys and girls, lest the snatchers come for them. Few were those who slept soundly through the night. For many years, Kosawa was shrouded in disquiet.

  Today I hear children joke about it as they play; they say, Do this, or stop doing that, otherwise the snatchers will come for you. Their friends laugh, and I know they do so only because we were spared. In my girlhood, young women even had a song about a maiden who could find no husband and prayed that the Spirit would send a snatcher for her, a man who would seize her out of her father’s hut and, upon seeing her face, make her his and cast off the chains of her unweddedness. The young women giggled when they sang this song. I loved its melody, but now, in my old age, I wonder, what song would they be singing if we’d been stolen and displaced and no one was left to tell our stories? The ones who were taken, where are their descendants now? What do these descendants know of their ancestral villages? What anguish follows them because they know nothing about the men and women who came before them, the ones who gave them their spirit?

  I once asked my husband why he thought Kosawa and the seven villages were spared. Was it because the Spirit had a fondness for us? The story given to us was that the most powerful mediums who’d ever existed walked among our ancestors at that time, and that these mediums had made a burnt offering of newborn pigs, and it was thanks to this sacrifice that the Spirit had caused the snatchers to never find any of our villages. The snatchers, if they’d walked past Kosawa, would have seen nothing of its huts or its inhabitants; they would have seen only the trees and shrubs. My husband had sighed at my question and said nothing, but I’d pushed. With another sigh, he asked me why those who were stolen had been punished for not having powerful mediums in their midst. Why couldn’t the Spirit have shown them mercy in the absence of sacrifice? Besides, he said, we weren’t spared, merely set aside to await the descent of another sort of terror. Which was true. Nowadays young people talk about the oil as if it’s our first misfortune; they forget that, long before the oil, the parents of our parents suffered for the sake of rubber.

  * * *

  —

  The young men who went to work in the rubber plantations did not leave Kosawa or any of the other seven villages with chains around their necks, but it might as well have been so. They numbered in the hundreds, my relatives among them, all taken away by law. Unlike the snatchers from the coast, who had arrived in darkness, these Europeans and their interpreters arrived in daylight. Guns pointed, they declared that every village had to volunteer men to work in rubber plantations—the new country they were building needed all available manpower. The Europeans picked out whatever number of able-bodied young men they needed. Those who resisted were shot dead. They assured families that the men they were taking would return as soon as they delivered their quota of rubber.

  Only later would our people learn that, while at the plantations, their sons and husbands were beaten and starved and made to work long after the sun had set. If a man fled without delivering his quota of rubber, the interpreters came for his family. Children were pulled from their huts and beaten in village squares because their fathers had escaped the rubber plantations. Wives were raped. Mothers punched. No one was spared. Rubber was needed in Europe, and it was incumbent upon our ancestors to meet the demand. For the sake of rubber, a generation of our young men was wiped away. How many men from Kosawa died on those plantations? In their absence, the European men took little boys, whom they whipped because the boys couldn’t tap the rubber fast enough. Through it all, though, Kosawa remained standing. Not every village the rubber men visited lived to tell its tale; we heard stories of some that were entirely eradicated.

  By the time I was born, there seemed to be signs that peace would return to our area, albeit nothing like what once was. The stories of the snatchers now seemed like legend, and the hunger for rubber in Europe had abated enough that our people’s blood no longer needed to be spilled for it. Still, the fear never left our mothers and fathers that some new demand would arise in Europe and their children would be taken away. As we entered adulthood, though, we saw no signs of a new affliction descending. The European men had been around long enough that we’d begun to fear them less, though we never forgot that they came not to befriend us but to make us do whatever it was that they wanted us to do. They introduced us to money, not because we needed it but because we had to learn how it worked for their sake. They forced their Spirit upon the weak-minded and built a church in Lokunja, not because we had any use for it but because they wanted us to believe that our Spirit was evil, our ways immoral. If they were to make us a part of their world, we had to integrate into our lives the principles by which they lived.

  * * *

  —

  A few years after Bongo was born, we learned that the masters had decided to return to Europe. What a day of rejoicing that was. We would have no more masters. Our children would have no masters; they would spend their lives walking tall on their own land. Looking at my children growing up in a world that seemed in a hurry to distance itself from the one in which I’d grown up, hearing the chants coming from the village school in another man’s language, I’d begun fearing that our ways would vanish in one generation, a shallow river besieged by a ruthless drought. Now I needed to fear no more. The w
ays of our ancestors could live on for posterity. Though it was too late to go back to living the way our forebears had lived under the laws of the Spirit, and though the departing masters did nothing to undo what generations before them had wrought upon us, we would at least no longer have them chipping away at what was left of our inheritance.

  Through Woja Beki, the masters told us that Lokunja would remain the seat of the government for our district—the people who would govern there, from the district officer to the least of them, would be from our area; we would have an understanding with them. The seat of the government for our country, the masters decided, would be in Bézam. The masters believed that the Bézam people were the most intelligent of all the people of our young country. I always wondered how they came to that conclusion. We knew little about these people in Bézam, besides that they lived in the direction from which the sun rises. We did not think we belonged with them any more than we belonged with other people in other parts of the world, but the decision on that wasn’t ours to make. Nor did we have a say in the Bézam man the masters picked to be our president. When that president died—we heard that the Europeans engineered his death after they decided he wasn’t an obedient servant—we didn’t have a say in the man chosen as our next president, the one who now rules us these decades later, the man we call His Excellency.

  One night, a decade into His Excellency’s reign, I turned to my husband in bed and asked him which he thought was worse: the European masters, or His Excellency. The madmen who created this farce of a nation, or the servant who took over the task of making sure it never fell apart. My husband shrugged and said he couldn’t decide. Maybe the masters were better, I said. He did not respond. He turned around and went to sleep.

  * * *

  —

  In every office and in every classroom across the district, a picture of His Excellency hangs on the wall: right-leaning leopard-skin hat on his head, a vertical mustache running down his philtrum as if to grab snot before it dropped. We hear he was a soldier who became a minister by virtue of the ease with which he slaughtered. We hear he is responsible for the death of our first president, that he killed the man by making him step on poison—he was ready to be president and couldn’t wait any longer for his turn. From the story that reached us, the masters had gone to His Excellency after they fell out with our first president, hoping that together they could devise a plan to oust their common foe within a year. His Excellency had told the masters to leave it to him; he had done the job in a day. Some say he went to a medium in his ancestral village and gave his manhood in exchange for power so he could rule over us for the rest of his days. Once a year, apparently, he goes to Europe so his blood can be drained and replaced with the blood of a younger man—everyone in this country will be dead and gone and he’ll still be here. We hear that he does not sleep in the same bed as his wife, that his children do not carry his blood. He does not eat meat, they say, because he’s a beast and cannot bear to eat the flesh of his brethren. We know little about his wife except that she hates her hair. It grows tight on her head like millipedes, exactly like ours, but this woman detests her hair so much that she shaves it all off, and her husband pays European people to make for her new hair, yellow in color, like the overseas women’s, but high on her head, and wide and long, which makes us wonder why a woman with a rich husband would think it a good idea to walk around with a bush on her head. They say it’s what His Excellency prefers.

  We’ve never seen his face in the flesh; ours is a remote village, too far for him to leave his palace to see. We only hear stories that have traveled from Bézam through countless villages before arriving in ours. I cannot swear that the stories are true. What I can attest to is that, the day he ascended to the top in Bézam, this country became his property. From it he harvests whatever pleases him and destroys whoever displeases him. With our sweat and blood paid as taxes, he has built houses in Europe grander than we can fathom. He has hired European men to paint pictures of him dressed like one of their kings. He has bought boats on which he dines with Americans. They say his shoes alone cost more money than a hundred men make in a year.

  Whenever I saw one of his soldiers walking around Lokunja, ready to shoot, I was reminded of his iron fist around our necks. With the power vested upon them by His Excellency, the soldiers needed permission from no one to mete out punishment. Laws were for us to obey, not to question. I have relatives in the sibling-villages who had to give up lands so offices could be built and roads that connected our district to the rest of the country could be widened. One of my cousins, they took his hut and left him with nothing. The soldiers said that if the government wanted someone’s land, the government had the right to the land. My cousin went to the district office and cried, but all he was told was that nothing could be done: the orders came from Bézam, from His Excellency.

  * * *

  —

  Then came Pexton.

  They didn’t arrive bearing guns. No, the men who arrived were a smiling group. It appeared as if, for once, something good was coming out of Bézam. The men told us about some people who sold oil overseas and called themselves Pexton. They said these oilmen did not operate under the orders of His Excellency, they answered only to the people who bought their oil. When we heard “overseas,” many of us weren’t sure what to think—what good ever came to us from overseas?—but the men from Bézam assured us that the masters and the people from Pexton came from different parts of overseas. They said Pexton was not from Europe, they were from America; they said Pexton had no relationship with our former masters. If we needed to know the truth, they added, American people were far better than Europeans. American people liked to mind their business and only do good—we would soon get a chance to see that for ourselves.

  The one thing we had to know, they went on, was that if oil was found under our land, Pexton would take over most of the valley—they’d need a lot of land to do their work. We wouldn’t have to give them the land on which our huts stood, but Pexton would need to pass equipment over the big river and through our farms; the equipment wouldn’t bother us. We didn’t understand how oil got under our land, but did it matter? All we had to do was sit back, let Pexton do its job and hand us our share of the money.

  I remember someone at that meeting asking the representatives how long it would take for Pexton to take all the oil it needed and leave the valley. The representatives looked at each other and stammered that it wouldn’t take long, not long at all. Of course it wouldn’t take long, we thought—how much oil could there be under the ground? We imagined Pexton would spend months, no more than a few years, in our midst. In that time they’d pull out more oil than they would need. Then they’d be gone. When we asked if our thinking was right, the men did not tell us it was wrong. Nor did they tell us that Pexton would channel all of its production water and toxic waste into the big river. They did not tell us that poison might travel through the soil from their site and shorten the lives of our children’s children. Why wouldn’t we be excited when the truth was so artfully withheld? It was all too easy to believe the sincerity in their eyes. We began dreaming of how splendid our lives would be. Everyone did, except for my husband.

  He did not believe any of it.

  He told me it was unfathomable to him how we could all believe such tales after what generations of men from overseas had done to us, after what men in Bézam were doing to us. I tried to remind him that the men had said that the people coming for the oil were not His Excellency’s people, and that they were not related to our former European masters, but he pushed my hand away when I tried to hold his. He said he never knew he’d married a fool for a wife. I was tempted to get angry, but I reminded myself that this was who he was—he couldn’t rejoice at good news, he had to find some fault in it.

  My husband went to see Woja Beki the evening after Woja Beki had gathered all the men of Kosawa and everyone had agreed that Pexton and its mi
ssion were no less than a gift from the Spirit, an answer to a prayer we hadn’t even uttered. My husband told Woja Beki that he disagreed with the entire village; he said he did not believe this story about people from overseas sharing profits with us—why would they do that now, when they’d never done it before? He wanted Woja Beki to send a message to Pexton that we did not want them on our land, but Woja Beki laughed at him. You need to learn how to be happy once in a while, Woja Beki said. Wasn’t being a perpetual woebegone painful? Why be so unbendingly glum when everyone was celebrating our good fortune?

  What Woja Beki didn’t tell my husband, what not even he knew then, was that His Excellency had already given the land to Pexton before those men came to see us; we had no say in the matter. We would learn this only years later, from a supervisor at Gardens who accidentally spilled the truth to Woja Beki. We would discover that the men with tales of prosperity only came to see us because Pexton wanted them to do it for the sake of propriety, and because a man in the government, a man familiar with our customs, had suggested it. This government man had told the Pexton people that they needed to do whatever they could so we would rejoice at their arrival. In our joy, the man had said, we would call upon our Spirit to bless Pexton and prosper them in order that we would, in turn, flourish through them. It wouldn’t hurt for Pexton to have the favor of our ancestors if they were to drill our land, the man had advised. The American people must have laughed at the mention of our ancestors: What can dead men and women do for us? they must have said—but, then, what would it cost them to send men here to tell us lies? Once we said a prayer for Pexton, the man went on, we wouldn’t be able to take it back, for a prayer said is an eternal plea, and even if we changed our minds about Pexton, the prayer would stay answered and Pexton would remain on our land, blessed by our Spirit.