* * *
THULA RETURNED TO KOSAWA SIX days before the Day, having taken off time from her job to be present in the area and be of help with the final details. She was sleeping in one of our huts, late one night, when the twins arrived and told us the time had come for the ritual.
The twins began by sedating her, spraying something in her room, and closing the door. After that, one of us carried her on his back into the twins’ hut and exited with no memories of what he’d seen. He did not need to see anything—the twins had told us what they’d do to her, and we’d agreed to help them do it, though only after a quarrel.
It was the worst argument we’d ever had: two of us were against the idea, three were for it. The night we met to decide on the matter was laden with pleas and blames and threats. The two of us opposed to the idea believed that it was not our place to make a decision about her body—we were neither her father nor her husband. Though we trusted the twins that the ritual would be for the best, that it would fortify the movement, we nonetheless thought it best that she be informed about the procedure so she could decide whether she wanted it to be performed on her. We were adamant that we would not partake in doing such a thing to her. But one of the three of us who supported the idea, in a long talk two nights before the ritual, argued that we had to help the twins. He said we couldn’t trust Thula to make the right decision on this matter; Thula was willing to die for a better country, but she’d never give up her right to control her body. We needed to make the choice for her, for her sake, for her dreams.
By the time the night of the ritual arrived, we were all in agreement that we had to do it for her sake. It brought us no joy to have to do such a thing to her, but sacrifices had to be made—hadn’t she often said so herself?
The twins, speaking to us as if we were children and they the adults, had told us what they would do to her. The semen would be that of a young man in the village, someone the Spirit would cause to sleepwalk into the twins’ hut, spill his seed into a bowl, and return to his bed still unconscious. Though the semen would be this young man’s, the child in it would be the Spirit’s, for the young man would only be a vessel.
In Thula’s sedated state, the twins would undress her from the waist down. One of them would spread her legs apart and keep them open while the other inserted the semen inside her, rubbing her belly as he chanted to the ancestors, declaring her victorious, proclaiming that the child of the Spirit within her would make her a woman above all men, anointing her the Mother of a people ready to be reborn. After the procedure, we would carry her back to her bed and lay her on her side to stop the semen from leaking. In no more than two days, all who looked upon her would see what the Spirit had done.
* * *
—
We were the first to notice the change, eager as we were to see the results, so much hinging on it. She was still the same size, and yet there was something about her, a glow and a majesty that could only be from the child growing within her. She was a woman, finally, beyond woman even, and everyone could see, though they could not tell why, they could only conclude that she was deserving of their devotion. She was no longer a childless old-girl whom loutish elders could laugh at, or the enigma her friends wanted to marry off; through the power of the Spirit-child living within her, she had transcended her body and become sublime.
The twins had told us that she’d never know anything of it, and we could tell it was so. The seed within her would stay dormant, and she would never question why she’d become a recipient of greater deference and admiration from men and women, old and young. When we asked the twins about the child she was carrying, they told us that the child was in no rush to depart the host of the unborn. On a day of the Spirit’s choosing, they said—it could be months or years away—whenever it was that Thula woke up in the arms of a beautiful man, the Spirit would cause the seed within her to start growing.
* * *
THE REVOLUTION BEGAN, AS SHE’D dreamed it, on a November evening in 2005, at the field of our former school in Lokunja. We set up stools for the old to sit on, and tables on which we would stand to speak. Our brothers and sisters and friends, mothers and fathers, relatives we would never have supposed cared for our message, arrived from all corners of the eight villages. Young men took buses from distant towns; young women dressed as if for weddings, hoping to find husbands. The enterprising brought one thing or another to sell. At one end of the field, drummers practiced for the finale while little children danced. We hadn’t planned for a festival, or a day for relatives to reconnect and for friends to meet to pass gossip, but that was what we got in the first hours. The entire district seemed to be there, the crowd spilling past the school compound. In the distance, soldiers stood with tight faces, their guns pointed. No one feared them; our bliss made them invisible.