How Beautiful We Were(24)
Once, one of us, feeling confident in his ability to speak English, had shouted out a greeting to an overseer who was visiting our village. Like the overseers before and after him, this American man lived in the brick house atop the hill facing the oil wells and the laborers’ camp, a house as big as all our huts combined. The loneliness thrust upon him might have been why he visited our village that day, to feel any kind of human touch. The man’s car had barely entered Kosawa when we gathered at the entrance to Woja Beki’s compound, singing: Motor car, motor car, I love you, motor car, take me to the capital, I want to be a capital. When the driver opened the door for the American to exit, we angled for the best position to watch him. As he was walking toward Woja Beki—who was grinning like the idiot he was—our friend shouted, “Hello, man,” which is how Teacher Penda had told us Americans greeted each other. Our mouths dropped. What was he doing? He had no right to speak to the overseer as if he were a friend. We saw the fear in Woja Beki’s eyes too. How would the overseer react? The overseer turned to face us, smiling. His eyes embraced the eyes of the one of us who had called out the greeting, and he said, “Well, hello to you too, my little friends.” We burst out laughing, poking each other in delight. Did we just make friends with an American? For days afterward, we couldn’t stop asking our friend to tell us how it felt to attract the attention of a man from America.
A few months later, on a day when our class was only half full because most of our friends needed to stay home due to a high fever or bad cough or an inexplicable rash and a multitude of symptoms, we talked about that afternoon during recess. We wondered if America was populated with cheerful people like that overseer, which made it hard for us to understand them: How could they be happy when we were dying for their sake? Why wouldn’t they ask their friends at Pexton to stop killing us? Was it possible they knew nothing of our plight? Was Pexton lying to them, just as they were lying to us?
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Some of our parents weren’t even born when Pexton first arrived, back when the valley contained only Kosawa and footpaths lined with trees around which animals frolicked and birds sang. “Rest assured that we won’t be here for long,” the government men accompanying the oil explorers told our grandparents, when they came out of their huts with open mouths and hands on hips to see the strangers who’d appeared in their village. Even after a detailed explanation of the mission, our people still couldn’t understand why the oil-seeking men couldn’t plant palm trees and make palm oil if it was oil they wanted. When Woja Beki—who had just taken over leadership of the village after the death of his father, Woja Bewa—asked this question of the government representatives, the representatives told him that the oil beneath our valley was a special kind, it was the kind that allowed cars to move, a clarification that made our grandparents look at each other in mutual amazement—they had seen cars in Lokunja but they’d never wondered what got the cars to move. The representatives told them that drilling for oil would bring something called “civilization” to our village. One day, the government representatives said, Kosawa would have a wonderful thing called “prosperity.” Could the men explain “civilization” and “prosperity” in our language? our grandparents had asked. The government men had said it was impossible for them to explain such terms fully, because it would be hard for our grandparents to understand what they’d never witnessed or considered a possibility. But as soon as “civilization” and “prosperity” arrived, they added, our grandparents would be in awe of what a beautiful life they offer; they would lose all comprehension of how they and their ancestors could have lived without the wonders heaped upon them by the rapidly changing world around them. They would pour libations over and over to thank their ancestors. They would sing songs of gratitude to the Spirit every morning for having put oil under their land.
Our grandparents had rejoiced upon hearing this.
They believed Pexton’s lie, and for a long time our parents did too, convinced that if only they remained patient the thing called “prosperity” would arrive like a cherished guest for whom the fattest pig had been slaughtered, and all of Kosawa would live in brick houses like the one Woja Beki would eventually own.
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Though our hatred of Pexton multiplied as we got older and our indignation deepened, we couldn’t deny the fact that Pexton had offered our grandfathers jobs and a chance to partake in the wealth that would be created from the drilling. Pexton had told our grandfathers that if they came to work for them, for a certain number of hours a day, and did as they were told to do, they would earn a fixed amount of money a month. Our grandfathers, however, had no interest in losing ownership of their lives—every one of them had turned down Pexton’s offer and returned to the thrill of killing for food as trees were felled all over the valley to make room for the oil field and pipelines and Gardens.
By the time our fathers came of age, around when Pexton began drilling its third well, it had become clear to everyone in Kosawa that the only way to partake in the oil wealth was to work for Pexton. But every time our fathers went to Gardens to apply for work, the supervisors told them that there were no jobs—all the jobs had been taken by men brought in from villages around Bézam, men whose brothers and uncles and cousins and tribesmen worked in government offices and had no doubt conducted secret meetings and signed cryptic documents to ensure that whatever prosperity the oil wells brought would be reserved for their families and clans and tribes. Our fathers had no one in Bézam to speak up and scheme for them to get the coveted jobs, so they had continued hunting and fishing before spills covered the big river, just like their fathers before them. Meanwhile, men from far-off places came to live in Gardens to do jobs that came with the privilege of living in brick houses and getting monthly envelopes of cash, money that allowed these laborers to build fine houses in their ancestral villages and send their children to schools in Bézam so the children would one day get office jobs and drive cars like American people, cars our parents’ children could only dream of touching.