by Imbolo Mbue
* * *
—
Her vision for the revolution was for it to begin officially on a day we would call Liberation Day. On that day, men and women from towns and villages in our district and surrounding districts would gather in Lokunja. She would invite a newspaperman, the man who had taken over Austin’s job. The newspaperman would take pictures and chronicle the rebirth of our country. If Liberation Day went well, we would have more rallies in other towns and in as many districts as we could, until we were ready for men and women to march in protest on a single day, in every town, in every village, all across the nation, fists clenched up and chanting, until the walls of the regime fell down flat.
She believed it was possible, far-fetched as it seemed. She was aware that it might take more than one revolution, or more than one century, to change our country, but that was no deterrent to her, only a motivation to continue the work the past generation had started so that future generations might complete it and never stop building upon it. She said to us often: America and the prosperous countries in Europe did not become what they are today without generation after generation of people fighting and dying for peace.
During those years of laying the foundation for Liberation Day, our weapons remained hidden. There were occasions when we were tempted to retrieve them and head to Gardens, often on days when Kosawa seemed devoid of joy because of death or worsening sickness or a bad spill. At such times, it appeared morning would never come. Conforming to the darkness around us seemed to be our only choice. Whenever our wives showed us the meager harvest from their farms, whenever we looked at the gas flares and imagined toxins coming for our children, we spent long nights fantasizing about putting holes in laborers’ heads. Our faith became the thinnest of threads, in danger of snapping at any moment, but we hung on to it as hard as we could. We prayed to the Spirit to keep us from falling, because we couldn’t fall; if we hoped to soar again, we couldn’t fall. And for Thula’s sake, we could not bring out the guns. Our day will come, we told each other when we got together late at night to dream while all of Kosawa slept.
* * *
In Bézam, Thula taught at the government leadership school during the day and, in the evenings, invited her favorite students to her house to talk about revolutions. They were her new Village Meeting, she told us. With them she discussed her favorite books; and to her they swore that they would join in fighting for Kosawa. We were happy that she had devotees in Bézam, but we doubted that these students’ interest in our struggle came from a pure place. None of them came from a village like ours. They had gained entrance into the school by virtue of their connections to powerful men—when did people ever rise up to put an end to their own privilege? Still, the idea of ending the reign of the man whose servants they were about to become, the monster their fathers bowed to during the day and cursed at night, must have been what lured them to Thula.
Three of these students were with her when, four years after her return to the country, she went to meet with Pexton’s managing director for our country, the man whose orders everyone at Gardens and the Pexton head office obeyed. Before the meeting, Thula had submitted countless requests for an audience and made numerous impromptu visits to the Pexton office complex, only to hear that the director was in a meeting, out of the country, or otherwise unavailable—would she like to leave a message?
The day she finally got the chance to meet with him was the day we learned why the Sweet One and the Cute One rarely visited Kosawa anymore, and what the true reason was for the delay in us getting our percentages: Pexton had decided to allow the matter to go to court, hoping to contest the Restoration Movement’s claim that we deserved a percentage of its profits. The case was waiting its turn in an American court. It was bound to make its way slowly from one American court to another. Because the American court system moved at the pace of a corpulent snail, our children would likely be parents before the time came for a judge to listen to both sides and make a final decision.
Pexton’s managing director leaned back in his chair and clasped his fingers behind his head as he told Thula that the Restoration Movement might as well give up on their fight for now: they did not appear to have the funds to wage such a long, costly battle. They already had dozens of open cases against a wide range of corporations and not enough resources to fight every case to completion. It was unlikely Kosawa would ever see its percentages. The director said there was nothing he could do to help us.
* * *
—
When Thula brought back the news to Kosawa, none of us understood why the Restoration Movement men had withheld the truth from us. Sonni, frail and leaning on his cane, gathered the men of Kosawa in the square and asked us what to do.
Several men thought we needed to summon the Sweet One and the Cute One to answer for themselves, but many more argued that it would be of no use—why shame them when they were likely only hoping to spare us the bad news? We need to go talk to the overseer directly, one of our fathers said. No one opposed him, nor did we need much debate before agreeing that it was time for us to move on without the Restoration Movement. Though Thula had been back for four years, we had still depended on the representatives to be our intermediary with Mr. Fish, because the Sweet One had suggested to Thula that it would be best if he and the Cute One concluded a promising conversation they already had under way with the overseer, it wouldn’t be a great idea for Thula to start a parallel dialogue. Thula had agreed. But now, given the news, and with Thula having a channel to the biggest Pexton man in the country, the time was right to start doing the discourse differently. At the time Thula met with the managing director, we hadn’t seen the Sweet One and the Cute One in nine months, so it didn’t take us long to come to a consensus that Sonni would ask Thula to lead a delegation to meet with Mr. Fish. She would speak to him in the way she’d learned how to speak to American men while living in their country. We had no better bridge between them and us than her.
* * *
—
We were not part of the delegation sent to Mr. Fish. The elders decided that, because Thula was a woman, the oldest of the village’s able men should accompany her, to give the delegation respectability. We would learn from her, after the visit, that in the absence of an interpreter she and Mr. Fish had chatted freely and at length about their times in New York, laughing when they discovered they’d both loved a particular store that sold old clothes. Thula’s elderly escorts, clueless about the conversation, had laughed too.
Yes, it was true that Pexton had decided to let the courts decide whether it owed Kosawa anything, Mr. Fish told Thula when the time came to discuss the reason for the visit. Pexton had said nothing of this to us because it wasn’t their place to inform us, it was the Restoration Movement’s.
“If I had the power to help Kosawa I would,” Mr. Fish said. “But I don’t. As you well know, this is all in the hands of the legal guys in New York. I did what I could to help broker a temporary deal when I first got here, but I can’t overstep my bounds.”
“We’ve been keeping our end of the deal for years,” Thula said. “Our situation is dire; it’s getting worse by the hour. We can’t wait indefinitely for a court decision.”
There was nothing Pexton could do about speeding the case through the courts, Mr. Fish said. All he could do, personally, was speak to his superior, the managing director; he could ask him to check with New York on the status of the case. Not that that was going to make a difference, but it was worth a try. It might also help if Kosawa was no longer represented by the lawyers for the Restoration Movement, he added.
“If your village were to speak for itself with you as their spokesperson,” he said, “it might make the guys in New York excited about wrapping things up.”
“Right,” Thula said, “because, with the Restoration Movement gone, there’ll be less of a chance of any new blunders by your company getting to the media.”
“I don’t doubt your sincerity.”
“Here’s what I can suggest: You and I and a couple of your village elders will go to Bézam to meet with the director. See what can be done about hastening things in New York. The director may have come across to you as cold, but he’s a good man; he has young children. Hearing about the children in your village is upsetting to all of us.”
“I’m open to the idea,” Thula said.
“But you have to understand that the director and the folks in New York are only going to be interested in talking to you if I tell them in advance that you’re willing to sign an agreement accepting whatever payment Pexton deems to be the best restitution for the deaths and damages, and you’re open to making a joint statement.”
“Absolutely not.”
“You have no leverage. There’s no basis for the suit the Restoration Movement lawyers filed. A judge is going to dismiss it—Pexton has no contractual obligation to Kosawa. I can’t make a fool of myself by asking my bosses to waste their time discussing an agreement with you if you’re going to walk in making outrageous demands. They don’t have time for that. Without a court verdict in your favor, you’re entitled to nothing. I’m offering you a chance, in good faith, to at least get something for your people.”
“And what if we say that a monetary compensation is not enough?” Thula asked. “Money is just a small part of the issue. We deserve to live in a safe environment.”
“I’m not in a position to make any promises on that.”
“And we’re not in a position to keep waiting year after year.”
“I’m sorry” was all Mr. Fish could say in response.
* * *
Thula’s visits to the village multiplied after that meeting. With the possibility of a peaceful accord through dialogue gone after three more meetings with Mr. Fish yielded no compromise, Liberation Day became more vital. For five days of the week she was in Bézam—spending half of her evenings with her Village Meeting, the other half with her mother and new father and her brother—and for two days she was with us, chauffeured from Bézam in the car in which we traveled to other towns and villages. No more than two of us accompanied her on any given trip; we took turns hunting and tending to our families, and planning the revolution.
In every town and village we visited, though men and women our age and older looked at her in befuddlement, the young people were enthralled. They came to sit with her, to hear her talk about her vision. She amused them with her stringy hair and how she sat with her legs crossed, as if she were an eminent man. They were curious about what she had seen and learned in America. Why would anyone travel to America and return to this ugly country? they asked her. The question always made her smile. Don’t you want our country to one day be as great as America? she would respond. She did not need to lecture them on the assured gloominess of their future under His Excellency. She did not need to tell them about how, much like their parents, they would have little ownership of their lives because the country wasn’t theirs and would never be, not when one man controlled it. What she needed to tell them, what few outside the capital knew, was that His Excellency, aging and anxious, had recently been growing even more ruthless.
* * *
—
Thula heard the talks around Bézam, about how His Excellency could sense the end of his reign was near—that was why he showed no mercy to friends and enemies alike. He had survived multiple coups, and executed all those who had plotted his demise, yet his enemies were still plentiful. Which was why he reshuffled his Cabinet every two years, sending former subordinates to prison for the slightest grievance lest they start having ideas. The prison where the Four had been held now contained the same men who had facilitated their entry there. Around Bézam, rumors circulated about how the president never slept in his bed, how he never told anyone where he was sleeping, lest a coup arise in the middle of the night: the first coup he survived had been orchestrated by the captain of the presidential guard. What worried him most, people claimed, was that he had no way of knowing all who hated him—Bézam was full of vultures masquerading as doves.
The entire city worshipped at his shrine, sang his praises at the annual celebration of his ascendance, and yet virtually every one of those worshippers longed to see him dead. He trusted not even his cook, according to the stories, which was why the cook had to bring a member of his own family to taste every meal in His Excellency’s presence before His Excellency would eat it. His most obsequious Cabinet member, with the backing of a European government that wanted no more ties with a lunatic, had plotted his death, schemed to have his plane shot down in a manner that would look like a crash; the scheming went on while His Excellency’s daughter was getting ready to marry the son of this Cabinet member. His Excellency had found out about the plot days before the wedding. The Cabinet member’s immediate execution had taken place on the busiest intersection of Bézam, hundreds watching at noontime, everyone afraid to cry.
At the next celebration of his reign, while soldiers and government workers and schoolchildren of all ages stood at attention, sweating on a scorching afternoon, His Excellency gave a speech christening himself the father of the nation, the lion whose mere presence causes all creatures to lie prostrate. Anyone planning to kill him was attempting to hurt his children by rendering them fatherless, he said. Their punishment would be singular. They would be sliced and stewed and served to him in a silver bowl.
You rise up against me, he declared, and you’ll never rise again.
* * *
Six years after Thula’s return home, we had yet to set a date for Liberation Day. We still went on trips to inform and awaken, traveling to some places multiple times, but few people, outside of packs of intrigued youths, showed strong interest in our cause. Our time will come, Thula said to us as we drove back to Kosawa enervated, but her words did little to assuage our doubts and our fears that nothing would ever change.
There were months when we visited no villages, our belief in the mission floundering wildly, but hers never did—she was born a missionary for fairness and could live as nothing but a believer. Her earnings from her job, whatever she didn’t spend on her expenses and on her mother and her new father, went to helping her friends and relatives care for their children, and funding our travels. She bought books for our children, and let the little ones climb into her car and honk the horn on the steering wheel. Never forget that it’s for them we’re doing everything, she told us. When we asked her how long we’d keep at it before giving up on the revolution dream, she said: We’ve planted seeds in minds, the seeds are bound to germinate and spread; we only need to be patient, people will awaken. When she said such things—often, as we sat in one of our parlors, pondering all that had come to pass since Konga asked us to rise—she seemed a new version of herself. A soft aura of madness encircled her, as if something of Konga’s now lived within her.
* * *
—
Our guns might have remained hidden in the forest forever, awaiting Thula’s blessing for us to use them, if one of us hadn’t returned from visiting a relative in another village to find his son dead.
We could not say if this child died of Pexton’s poison—he didn’t have a cough or a high fever, but he had been vomiting for two days. What we could say was that he might have been spared if Pexton’s poison hadn’t caused the herbs used to cure stomach ailments to wither. We could say, without equivocation, that Pexton killed him the day our soil became too toxic to sustain the medicinal herbs that once grew in abundance.
Our friend wept like a child as he sat in the graveyard watching us dig his son’s final resting place. During the burial, we needed all of our strength to hold his wife back so she wouldn’t jump into the grave after her little boy’s coffin had been lowered in.
The evening after the funera
l, our friend decided his wait was over.
Possessed by an evil long lying dormant within him, he went into the forest. He dug out his gun and headed into the bushes at the edge of Gardens. From behind a tree, through his gun’s telescopic sight, he observed three laborers smoking pipes in the late evening’s breeze, chatting about one thing or another that had transpired during their day.
He killed them all.
Shot the first in the head. The second man’s bullet entered his chest before a scream could get off his tongue. The third man he shot in the back as he turned to run away. No one in Gardens heard anything; the gun’s silencer made sure of that. The bodies would not be found until after our friend had fled to the guns’ hiding place. There he stayed as darkness descended, weeping, with the weapon in his hand.
After reburying the gun, he came to one of our huts to tell us what he had done. He was still crying and trembling, his eyes bloodshot. His son was his first child, his only son. His name would die with him if his wife did not give him another boy.
Two of us had already buried children, all of us had carried more miniature coffins than we could count, but something about watching our friend undone by grief made us realize that our time to kill had come. We’d had enough. We’d wept enough. We’d buried enough. Our enemies needed to start paying for our suffering.
We decided on that day that we did not need Thula’s blessing to do what we ought to do for our families. We would continue traveling with her to convince people to come to Liberation Day, and we would start avenging every child Kosawa had lost.
* * *
—
For days after the killings, we waited for soldiers to arrive. They didn’t. Pexton, we later found out, had decided not to make the killings public, afraid of what the news might suggest about its oil field. We later heard that supervisors told the murdered men’s families that the men had died in a drilling accident, that their deaths had been so grotesque their bodies weren’t suitable for viewing. We heard the families were given the remains in coffins sealed by Pexton so that the true cause of the men’s death would never be found—how would Pexton have explained its laborers dying of gunshot wounds when the only people who owned guns were soldiers?