How Beautiful We Were(76)
Whenever I saw one of his soldiers walking around Lokunja, ready to shoot, I was reminded of his iron fist around our necks. With the power vested upon them by His Excellency, the soldiers needed permission from no one to mete out punishment. Laws were for us to obey, not to question. I have relatives in the sibling-villages who had to give up lands so offices could be built and roads that connected our district to the rest of the country could be widened. One of my cousins, they took his hut and left him with nothing. The soldiers said that if the government wanted someone’s land, the government had the right to the land. My cousin went to the district office and cried, but all he was told was that nothing could be done: the orders came from Bézam, from His Excellency.
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Then came Pexton.
They didn’t arrive bearing guns. No, the men who arrived were a smiling group. It appeared as if, for once, something good was coming out of Bézam. The men told us about some people who sold oil overseas and called themselves Pexton. They said these oilmen did not operate under the orders of His Excellency, they answered only to the people who bought their oil. When we heard “overseas,” many of us weren’t sure what to think—what good ever came to us from overseas?—but the men from Bézam assured us that the masters and the people from Pexton came from different parts of overseas. They said Pexton was not from Europe, they were from America; they said Pexton had no relationship with our former masters. If we needed to know the truth, they added, American people were far better than Europeans. American people liked to mind their business and only do good—we would soon get a chance to see that for ourselves.
The one thing we had to know, they went on, was that if oil was found under our land, Pexton would take over most of the valley—they’d need a lot of land to do their work. We wouldn’t have to give them the land on which our huts stood, but Pexton would need to pass equipment over the big river and through our farms; the equipment wouldn’t bother us. We didn’t understand how oil got under our land, but did it matter? All we had to do was sit back, let Pexton do its job and hand us our share of the money.
I remember someone at that meeting asking the representatives how long it would take for Pexton to take all the oil it needed and leave the valley. The representatives looked at each other and stammered that it wouldn’t take long, not long at all. Of course it wouldn’t take long, we thought—how much oil could there be under the ground? We imagined Pexton would spend months, no more than a few years, in our midst. In that time they’d pull out more oil than they would need. Then they’d be gone. When we asked if our thinking was right, the men did not tell us it was wrong. Nor did they tell us that Pexton would channel all of its production water and toxic waste into the big river. They did not tell us that poison might travel through the soil from their site and shorten the lives of our children’s children. Why wouldn’t we be excited when the truth was so artfully withheld? It was all too easy to believe the sincerity in their eyes. We began dreaming of how splendid our lives would be. Everyone did, except for my husband.
He did not believe any of it.
He told me it was unfathomable to him how we could all believe such tales after what generations of men from overseas had done to us, after what men in Bézam were doing to us. I tried to remind him that the men had said that the people coming for the oil were not His Excellency’s people, and that they were not related to our former European masters, but he pushed my hand away when I tried to hold his. He said he never knew he’d married a fool for a wife. I was tempted to get angry, but I reminded myself that this was who he was—he couldn’t rejoice at good news, he had to find some fault in it.
My husband went to see Woja Beki the evening after Woja Beki had gathered all the men of Kosawa and everyone had agreed that Pexton and its mission were no less than a gift from the Spirit, an answer to a prayer we hadn’t even uttered. My husband told Woja Beki that he disagreed with the entire village; he said he did not believe this story about people from overseas sharing profits with us—why would they do that now, when they’d never done it before? He wanted Woja Beki to send a message to Pexton that we did not want them on our land, but Woja Beki laughed at him. You need to learn how to be happy once in a while, Woja Beki said. Wasn’t being a perpetual woebegone painful? Why be so unbendingly glum when everyone was celebrating our good fortune?
What Woja Beki didn’t tell my husband, what not even he knew then, was that His Excellency had already given the land to Pexton before those men came to see us; we had no say in the matter. We would learn this only years later, from a supervisor at Gardens who accidentally spilled the truth to Woja Beki. We would discover that the men with tales of prosperity only came to see us because Pexton wanted them to do it for the sake of propriety, and because a man in the government, a man familiar with our customs, had suggested it. This government man had told the Pexton people that they needed to do whatever they could so we would rejoice at their arrival. In our joy, the man had said, we would call upon our Spirit to bless Pexton and prosper them in order that we would, in turn, flourish through them. It wouldn’t hurt for Pexton to have the favor of our ancestors if they were to drill our land, the man had advised. The American people must have laughed at the mention of our ancestors: What can dead men and women do for us? they must have said—but, then, what would it cost them to send men here to tell us lies? Once we said a prayer for Pexton, the man went on, we wouldn’t be able to take it back, for a prayer said is an eternal plea, and even if we changed our minds about Pexton, the prayer would stay answered and Pexton would remain on our land, blessed by our Spirit.