The only woman who offered her family a pot to lick was a woman her mother once met at a party. She saw them waiting at a bus stop as she was driving by and stopped. Since she was in need of a new servant, she offered them her servant’s room, a shed at the back of her house, one room for them to share, a mother and five children. Their food would be free, but her mother would have to cook for the household—husband, wife, a daughter Nubia’s age. Nubia’s mother would have to go to the market, clean the house, hand-wash clothes, serve meals, wash and dry dishes, do what servants once did for her. Her mom said yes. In the shed they lived. They slept on a single bed, lying horizontally to fit on it. That is what her father condemned them to the day he gave his life for a dream.
She told me, crying, of the night when she was seventeen and the wife and daughter of the house had traveled to visit relatives and the husband was alone at home. How she entered the husband’s bedroom and shut the door behind her, took off her clothing as the man’s eyes bulged. How she did to him things she’d read about in steamy novels. He grunted so loud she feared his wife would hear in the next district. She returned for three more nights. They did it again when he found a reason to send his wife and child away for two weeks, during which time she went to him after school, telling her mom she had to study. In his ecstasy, he promised to do anything and everything to help her and her mom and her siblings. He kept his promise and got her into the leadership school, where I was waiting for her to walk beside me on my climb to the top of the government.
When she was done telling me her story, she swore that when she had children she would burn down cities to give them everything and rip out the hearts of anyone who dared try to take anything that belonged to them. I knew then that she would one day become the rock upon which I would build the next generation of the Nangi family.
* * *
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Mama began telling me when I was a boy that the Nangi family name was mine to carry forward; she said I had to do all I could to extend our bloodline. Yaya reminded me often too that I would have to one day marry and have children, and that I would need to tell my children about those who came before me. For nodding at everything Yaya said, she blessed me with good fortune.
My new papa had his own dreams for me.
He believed I was destined to become a great man, which was why, though he wasn’t rich, he sent me to the finest schools. I never told him that I wanted to spend my life drawing—with Thula wedded to her mission, I was my parents’ only chance at a joyful and proud old age, and I longed to give it to them. Papa spent hours helping me with my homework, and when I passed my tests he gave me cash gifts. When the time came for me to get into a career training program, he went to the biggest men he knew in government, seeking help for his gifted son. He couldn’t do it alone, being that he was but one of thousands of small men sitting at the bottom and striving for their sons to get to the top. Mama cooked and assembled baskets of fruits, and Papa took them to these men in their homes, along with bottles of alcohol, goats from the open-air market, and stuffed envelopes. That was how I got into the sole government leadership school in the country.
During my days at the school, I wrote to Thula about what I was learning, the conversations I was having with my classmates. I told her about all the ways my being in government could help villages like Kosawa. What the country needed was a government made of people like us, those who had suffered the consequences of bad policies and knew how things ought to be. We needed a leader who would put citizens first, place all businesses under state ownership. We needed to direct all funds from exports into the nation’s coffers. If we put in measures to prevent the coffers from being pinched, they would eventually overflow. We would use our abundant wealth for healthcare, for education, jobs creation. There was no reason why citizens should lack when the country had bauxite to the north, oil to the west, timber to the east. With a visionary leader, a prosperous country was possible. Wasn’t it evident, I asked her, that good government was the solution to the ills of our nation? I told her I believed we could do it, our generation. We could be the ones to uplift and equalize, no citizen greater or lesser than another. We could create a beautiful country. But first we had to wait our turn; the older generation’s turn was not over yet. Our current leaders were men for whom the word “change” elicited chuckles, but there wasn’t much we could do to force them and their archaic mentalities out, we had to wait for their eras to end. The past would soon be gone, and the future would be ours to design.