How Beautiful We Were(28)

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I AM NEITHER KOSAWA’S BEST hunter nor farmer, and I won’t be an elder for decades. Yet, after the soldiers left, the men of my village chose me to be their leader.

Lusaka stood in front of our gathering that evening and declared that we needed a new, fearless leader. An age-mate of my brother’s named Tunis offered his services, but nobody was enthused about anointing him—passionate as he is, he enjoys a good laugh far too much, and he has newborn twin daughters at home, a life change certain to do nothing to make a man manlier. My cousin Sonni offered too; his father, my uncle Manga, agreed that his son, wise since birth, would make a great leader. But someone shouted that it wasn’t right for a father to nominate his son. An argument was about to ensue over who had the right to nominate whom when Lusaka raised his hand to ask for silence. In the same spot where he’d asked us to take the Pexton men to his hut, he told everyone that he believed I should be the leader. He said no one present had done more for Kosawa in the past year. Several men nodded. No one stood up to counter him.

I wanted to stand and say the same about him, but he spoke without pause, giving me no space to slide my words between his. The reasons were many why he wanted me to lead, he said. I’d participated in digging a grave for every child who had died in the past two years. (About this he was wrong—after Elali told me she no longer loved me, I’d sat in my bedroom and stared at the wall a full day, disregarding Malabo’s pleas that I eat, ignoring the wails coming from a hut where a nine-month-old boy had gone to sleep and never woken up. I hadn’t gone to that baby’s funeral or cared to know his name.)

Lusaka said I’d orchestrated the search for the vanished men in Bézam (I’d indeed assembled the search party and led the way around Bézam, but I’d done it not for Kosawa, but for my brother and my family). He added, incorrectly, that I’d been among the first to step forward when Konga called for volunteers to drag away the Pexton men (I was at the back of the pack of young men who went to the front). When, on that night of the village meeting, as per Konga’s order, I arrived in front of the twins’ hut and realized that some of the men of Kosawa weren’t there, Lusaka continued—pointing at all of the cowards, their faces turned away—I’d gone to their huts and dragged them from beneath their wives’ skirts, but not before telling their wives and children what the men were: cowering, wet chickens; phonies undeserving of the good in their lives (I’d said no such things. I’d only told the men that they had to come with me, though I now wish I’d insulted them inside their huts—no able man who sits at home while other men go to fight and die for his family is deserving of the honor of being called a man).



“Bongo was the one who negotiated with Woja Beki before the soldiers’ visit,” Lusaka said, which was true, though he was there too, along with two elders. But he was right—I was the one who told Woja Beki that Kosawa’s future rested on his choosing a side and sticking with it: he could either choose his people or choose their enemies. He had chosen us, even if only for that afternoon. The soldiers had left, convinced that the Pexton men were not in our village. The battle was just beginning, but we were winning.

“Aren’t we winning?” Lusaka asked the assembly of men.

“We are,” they replied.

“Won’t we keep winning?”

“We will.”

“Yes, we will,” he said. “And we can thank Bongo for that.”



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Every morning I ask the Spirit to grant me reasons to be grateful. I pray for protection upon my brother’s children. Juba has nightmares from which he wakes up sweating, and Thula, ever since I returned from Bézam empty-handed, doesn’t have much to say to me—I failed her father, I failed her. I long for the days when she was a little girl who would come into my bedroom at dawn, slip into my bed, and tuck her hands inside my shirt. Sometimes I’d tickle her just to hear her laugh. I loved watching her prominent, round eyes get wider. It was evident even then, by her heart-shaped lips, and her lengthy eyelashes, that she would grow up to be a beauty. She’s now on the cusp of that, though with her thin frame it’s unlikely hers will be the kind of body men in Kosawa will crave. The fact that she curls further into herself as she gets older, smiling at intervals but revealing nothing about her inner being, makes me worry she’ll grow up to be too mysterious and her wondrous face will go to waste. Her father was inscrutable too; they did not share much of a physical resemblance, but her mind was a replica of his. Numerous were the evenings they spent chatting and laughing on the veranda. Now that he’s gone, I worry she has closed herself off because she wants to share her thoughts with him and him only. She may not go around saying it, but she’s angry with all those who colluded to rob her of her father. Alas, what can she do about her anger? There are moments when she’s reading a schoolbook and she appears ordinary, but with every day added to the number of days Malabo has been gone, she speaks less and her anger reveals more of itself in the weakness of her smiles, which she’s more likely to give while she’s listening to her friends than when she’s sitting in a hut in which her father no longer lives.



If she were any other girl, I would merely wish that the Spirit mend her heart and free her of the agony she bears, but she’s my brother’s child. Without knowing the future—without knowing when I’ll finish this work Malabo started and turn my energy toward finding a wife to bear me children—she might be the closest I’ll have to a daughter for a while. That is why I want, desperately, as impossible as it seems, for her to grow up to be an unshackled woman, so that I may tell my brother, when we meet again, that though I’d failed at saving him from whoever felled him, I hadn’t failed in keeping his children safe by doing everything I could so they could grow up in a clean Kosawa.