How Beautiful We Were(69)

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We didn’t have much to tell her in our response; little had changed for us.

We were still the seven of us, waiting for the rains to come and go, hunting antelopes and porcupines and taking them to the big market. We still got together in the village square and we attended death celebrations and birth celebrations and marriage celebrations, keeping our eyes on the girls we’d decided to marry, making sure they were still proving themselves worthy of our love and protection. The father of one of us had recently died, and we knew it wouldn’t be long before all of our fathers left to meet the ancestors and we’d have to bear children to fill up our huts, and then become our fathers, and someday our grandfathers, though the thought of that did not delight us.

The village still met with the Sweet One and the Cute One. They rarely had much to report except for the fact that things were moving, slowly but certainly. They claimed that as soon as discussions between the Restoration Movement and Pexton were completed, the pipelines would be fixed and the waste swept off the river and the gas flares reduced. For now, though, they said, it would be best if we focused on the fact that children were dying less often, thanks to the bottled water, and buses were taking boys to Lokunja to acquire knowledge. Before we knew it, Kosawa would be Kosawa again.

When we had asked them, at the last meeting, when they thought Pexton would leave, would it be years or decades, they had replied that, well, that was a tough question to answer. Our best option for now, they said, was to learn how to be good neighbors with the corporation. We told them that Pexton could never be our neighbor because the land wasn’t theirs. The land was our land. It would never be theirs, no matter how often they said so. The Sweet One responded that he understood and completely agreed with us, but the ownership of the land was now a matter of law, only the government could determine who owned what land. He told us that, the previous week, His Excellency had declared that just because our ancestors claimed the entire valley as theirs did not mean the valley was theirs and ours as a result. Which meant that the land belonged to all the people of the country; the government, as the servant of the people, had the authority to give some of the people’s land to Pexton so Pexton could use it to better the lives of all citizens.



At this revelation, we stood up, our voices raised in pained incredulity, this being the first time we’d ever heard such a thing. The Cute One begged us to calm down. He said the entire world agreed with us: no government had the right to make such claims. But until the day His Excellency agreed with us, he added, Pexton would not be leaving.

We told Thula this in our letter.

We told her that, based on the Sweet One’s statement, we did not believe Pexton would ever clean up or leave our land; our children and their children would in all certainty live forever amid their poison. We told her we did not understand why the Restoration Movement was regurgitating such nonsense to us—the fact that they were doing so made us wonder how much our suffering pained them. How hard could we trust them to fight for us, considering that their most powerful weapon was words? Wasn’t it time we stopped using words and tried something else, something altogether new?

We did not receive a response from Thula for several months.

The day we finally did was a rainy day when we’d all stayed home. She told us, in her letter, that the cold season had left the city and it was now close to warm, though not as hot as she wished. She’d done better in her classes than she had hoped. Then she said:




Remember that meeting I told you I was going to attend in my last letter? The one in the place called the Village? My friend was right, nothing about the place reminded me of Kosawa, but I cannot tell you how much the meeting energized me. The moment I left there I began writing this letter in my head, eager to tell you everything I’d witnessed. The people at this meeting were there to talk about what we could do about corporations like Pexton. These people were not like the ones at the Restoration Movement, talking about how we can peacefully bring about change with dialogue, negotiation, common ground, more dialogue. No, these people were angry. One man stood up and spoke of a place many days’ travel by car from New York, this place has pipelines too. The pipelines are not spilling like ours, but the people there do not want them crossing their land, they say pipelines are a calamity waiting to happen. Their government disagrees, so these people have to live with the pipelines just as we have to. Pipelines, in America—can you believe such a thing? The pipelines here run under the ground, but the people say it doesn’t matter—simply having them deprives their land of its sanctity. But their government is not concerned about the sanctity of their land. In this country, governments and corporations are friends too. Over here, governments also sit back and do nothing while corporations chain people up and throw them in bondage.





And there’s another place, on the other side of the country, where children are drinking poisoned water. The government knew the water was poisoned and did nothing about it. Listening to this, I thought I was in some bizarre dream in which America had revealed itself to be Kosawa. The stories were endless. There’s also an area south of here, where land is disappearing into the sea. Every day land the size of a small village is lost, all because oil corporations have the liberty to do as they please and the government chooses to do little while its citizens watch helplessly. I could hardly breathe as I listened to these stories about small corporations and big corporations, about government offices that said one thing when something else was the case, about representatives who told people nothing was wrong though they knew disaster was approaching. We knew we were not the only ones in our country, but could you have ever imagined that such things are happening to people in great countries too?