How Beautiful We Were(64)

We looked at each other.

“What’s going on, Mama?” Thula asked me.

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?



* * *



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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.