How Beautiful We Were(75)

By the time I was born, there seemed to be signs that peace would return to our area, albeit nothing like what once was. The stories of the snatchers now seemed like legend, and the hunger for rubber in Europe had abated enough that our people’s blood no longer needed to be spilled for it. Still, the fear never left our mothers and fathers that some new demand would arise in Europe and their children would be taken away. As we entered adulthood, though, we saw no signs of a new affliction descending. The European men had been around long enough that we’d begun to fear them less, though we never forgot that they came not to befriend us but to make us do whatever it was that they wanted us to do. They introduced us to money, not because we needed it but because we had to learn how it worked for their sake. They forced their Spirit upon the weak-minded and built a church in Lokunja, not because we had any use for it but because they wanted us to believe that our Spirit was evil, our ways immoral. If they were to make us a part of their world, we had to integrate into our lives the principles by which they lived.



* * *



—



A few years after Bongo was born, we learned that the masters had decided to return to Europe. What a day of rejoicing that was. We would have no more masters. Our children would have no masters; they would spend their lives walking tall on their own land. Looking at my children growing up in a world that seemed in a hurry to distance itself from the one in which I’d grown up, hearing the chants coming from the village school in another man’s language, I’d begun fearing that our ways would vanish in one generation, a shallow river besieged by a ruthless drought. Now I needed to fear no more. The ways of our ancestors could live on for posterity. Though it was too late to go back to living the way our forebears had lived under the laws of the Spirit, and though the departing masters did nothing to undo what generations before them had wrought upon us, we would at least no longer have them chipping away at what was left of our inheritance.

Through Woja Beki, the masters told us that Lokunja would remain the seat of the government for our district—the people who would govern there, from the district officer to the least of them, would be from our area; we would have an understanding with them. The seat of the government for our country, the masters decided, would be in Bézam. The masters believed that the Bézam people were the most intelligent of all the people of our young country. I always wondered how they came to that conclusion. We knew little about these people in Bézam, besides that they lived in the direction from which the sun rises. We did not think we belonged with them any more than we belonged with other people in other parts of the world, but the decision on that wasn’t ours to make. Nor did we have a say in the Bézam man the masters picked to be our president. When that president died—we heard that the Europeans engineered his death after they decided he wasn’t an obedient servant—we didn’t have a say in the man chosen as our next president, the one who now rules us these decades later, the man we call His Excellency.



One night, a decade into His Excellency’s reign, I turned to my husband in bed and asked him which he thought was worse: the European masters, or His Excellency. The madmen who created this farce of a nation, or the servant who took over the task of making sure it never fell apart. My husband shrugged and said he couldn’t decide. Maybe the masters were better, I said. He did not respond. He turned around and went to sleep.



* * *



—

In every office and in every classroom across the district, a picture of His Excellency hangs on the wall: right-leaning leopard-skin hat on his head, a vertical mustache running down his philtrum as if to grab snot before it dropped. We hear he was a soldier who became a minister by virtue of the ease with which he slaughtered. We hear he is responsible for the death of our first president, that he killed the man by making him step on poison—he was ready to be president and couldn’t wait any longer for his turn. From the story that reached us, the masters had gone to His Excellency after they fell out with our first president, hoping that together they could devise a plan to oust their common foe within a year. His Excellency had told the masters to leave it to him; he had done the job in a day. Some say he went to a medium in his ancestral village and gave his manhood in exchange for power so he could rule over us for the rest of his days. Once a year, apparently, he goes to Europe so his blood can be drained and replaced with the blood of a younger man—everyone in this country will be dead and gone and he’ll still be here. We hear that he does not sleep in the same bed as his wife, that his children do not carry his blood. He does not eat meat, they say, because he’s a beast and cannot bear to eat the flesh of his brethren. We know little about his wife except that she hates her hair. It grows tight on her head like millipedes, exactly like ours, but this woman detests her hair so much that she shaves it all off, and her husband pays European people to make for her new hair, yellow in color, like the overseas women’s, but high on her head, and wide and long, which makes us wonder why a woman with a rich husband would think it a good idea to walk around with a bush on her head. They say it’s what His Excellency prefers.



We’ve never seen his face in the flesh; ours is a remote village, too far for him to leave his palace to see. We only hear stories that have traveled from Bézam through countless villages before arriving in ours. I cannot swear that the stories are true. What I can attest to is that, the day he ascended to the top in Bézam, this country became his property. From it he harvests whatever pleases him and destroys whoever displeases him. With our sweat and blood paid as taxes, he has built houses in Europe grander than we can fathom. He has hired European men to paint pictures of him dressed like one of their kings. He has bought boats on which he dines with Americans. They say his shoes alone cost more money than a hundred men make in a year.