—
There’s no other way to live, we wrote back to her.
What she was suggesting indeed sounded daunting, we said, but we’d rather fight and die than live as cowards. We would follow her and trust that whatever plan she had in mind would give us new lives—that was why she had gone to America, to bring back for our benefit what she had learned. We cautioned her that it was unlikely people across the country would share her enthusiasm for toppling His Excellency, not wanting to call his wrath upon their towns and villages, but we wouldn’t know until we spoke to them.
In her response, she said that she’d learned from Austin to focus not on what was or what might be but on what is. Still, she admitted that she had moments when she thought about her father and her uncle and all those whom Kosawa had lost, and she couldn’t help being afraid that our village might lose many more before this was all over. But the memory of our departed also gave her strength. She said:
Last week, Austin read me an essay he’d written as homage to men like my father and my uncle. In it, he spoke of how brave men were falling all over the world, the sacrifices of their lives going to waste as new forms of greed and recklessness overtake the old ones. What will become of those who rise to take the place of the likes of my father and my uncle? Flickers of progress are brightening lives in isolated corners of the world, yes, but a universal solution eludes us.
As much as Austin and I argue on how best to free ourselves and those around us, we agree on everything else. We agree that too many humans are losing awareness of their true nature, leading the most rapacious of us to see the rest as feasts to be devoured. I am consoled, and further broken, by what I’ve seen in America, by the awareness that Kosawa is only one of thousands of places to be so thoroughly overcome; that places mightier than us have been broken far more severely. I still attend meetings in the Village every week, and at every meeting we ask ourselves: What do we do now? What do we do after we’ve done all we can and seen no change? What will our children do after they’ve done what they can and failed, just as our fathers failed before us?
Austin won’t stop begging me to stay in America. He says I could make money and send it to you. He thinks it might actually be better if we sold Kosawa to Pexton. How can he understand? Money will do what it can, but what we want isn’t just to be left alone. What we want is to own our lives and strut like the sons and daughters of leopards that we are.
* * *
—
After we received that letter, whenever we thought of her words and her belief that we had every right to dignity and respect, our chests puffed out and our shoulders went high. Later that month, the entire village echoed her when we all gathered to celebrate the rite of passage of a generation of boys entering manhood.
The manhood passage was always one of our favorite celebrations, because it reminded us of who we were as a people and the kind of life we were created to live. We laughed whenever we reminisced about the night before our passage, when we were taken deep into the forest by male relatives and left there. Some of our age-mates had tried to follow their relatives back home, and the relatives had whipped them and threatened to tie them to a tree. None of us were allowed to return home till the sun rose. We spent all night calling each other’s names amid inexplicable noises and smells, struggling to find one another in the darkness, scared we’d step on a snake or a scorpion. Those of us who found friends huddled with them against a tree, shivering; we weren’t allowed to take a blanket, though the rituals always took place in the rainy season. If we couldn’t find a friend, we climbed on trees for safety, or sat up all night hugging ourselves, too scared to lie down alone. By morning, we were covered with mosquito bites but proud that we’d proved ourselves fearless. Walking to the village, laughing, we interrupted each other and shouted to be heard, eager to share our tales of survival.
We returned to the village to the sounds of our mothers’ cheering, though they had no reason to fear that we wouldn’t return—no Kosawa boy had ever failed to return to the village the night before the celebration. Still, the drums beat hard, and aunts and older sisters sweated in the kitchen as they cooked. But we couldn’t eat yet. We couldn’t hug our mothers. We weren’t even allowed to go to our huts. We were ushered directly to the square by our fathers and the elders. There, we sat on mats under the mango tree. We were not allowed to move or to speak, because manhood would require us to practice stillness. Only hand gestures were allowed if we needed to go use the toilet, after which we returned to our sitting position, hungry and cold. We sat there all morning and afternoon, until the hour the village was ready to commence the celebration.