Much as the men of Kosawa recognized the danger the twins’ hut posed, there was no better place for them to go to prepare for a potential confrontation with soldiers. It is likely that, in those hours after the village meeting, some of our fathers cowered when the twins told them to enter the hut, while the rest of them urged the frightened ones to stand tall and be men. Or maybe Jakani chanted a solo that made everyone file in like ants marching at their leader’s command. Ultimately, all of the men must have entered the hut, which was why Kosawa was quiet after we returned to our huts. Inside the twins’ hut, we believed, Sakani gave the men a pre-battle potion to drink, to erase their anxiety and fortify their minds. We imagined that Jakani asked them to kneel in the center of the hut before calling upon the Spirit to possess them with a fearlessness so all-consuming they would overcome our enemies as utterly as the light overcomes darkness at dawn.
The men walked out of the hut in the morning with no memory of what had been done to them; we know this because our fathers’ memories of the previous day were still intact, but none of them could recall what they’d done from late that night to the dawn of the next day. It was thus evident to all of Kosawa that, with the power bestowed upon him by the Spirit, Jakani had reached into the men’s brains and turned off their memories. He must have restarted them only when the men were at a safe distance from his hut, after they’d left the confines of where the spirit and human worlds intersect. Our fathers, if they’d been aware of what the twins were doing to them, wouldn’t have complained, knowing that everything the twins did was for the good of Kosawa. They would have been thankful that, in briefly shutting down their consciousness, Jakani had protected them from coming face-to-face with the Spirit, an experience no mortal could survive.
* * *
—
We had as good a time in class that morning as we’d had in months. When Teacher Penda lectured on the government, we tried not to laugh as he stressed that it was made of the country’s most intelligent men. At the end of the lecture, one of us asked him to tell us more about His Excellency—what made His Excellency such a great president? Teacher Penda told us to list some traits a person needs in order to be a good leader. We called out several—friendly, kind, funny, respectful. Teacher Penda told us that His Excellency had all of these traits and more. His Excellency was the smartest man in the world, he said; not many countries were blessed to have a president like ours. We did not argue; we’d lived long enough to know he was simply saying what he was paid to say.
When he wasn’t saying what he needed to say, Teacher Penda told us many truths. By the time we were eight, we knew more about where our oil was heading than our grandparents and their parents ever did. We knew because Teacher Penda taught us about America—how people there lived in big brick houses, and how they loved to mash their potatoes before eating them with objects called “ferks.” He taught us how to speak English, though we could never speak it as well as the American overseer at Gardens. Sometimes we used English words when we played, saying things like “who cares,” and “absolutely not,” and “holy shit,” to impress one another.
Once, one of us, feeling confident in his ability to speak English, had shouted out a greeting to an overseer who was visiting our village. Like the overseers before and after him, this American man lived in the brick house atop the hill facing the oil wells and the laborers’ camp, a house as big as all our huts combined. The loneliness thrust upon him might have been why he visited our village that day, to feel any kind of human touch. The man’s car had barely entered Kosawa when we gathered at the entrance to Woja Beki’s compound, singing: Motor car, motor car, I love you, motor car, take me to the capital, I want to be a capital. When the driver opened the door for the American to exit, we angled for the best position to watch him. As he was walking toward Woja Beki—who was grinning like the idiot he was—our friend shouted, “Hello, man,” which is how Teacher Penda had told us Americans greeted each other. Our mouths dropped. What was he doing? He had no right to speak to the overseer as if he were a friend. We saw the fear in Woja Beki’s eyes too. How would the overseer react? The overseer turned to face us, smiling. His eyes embraced the eyes of the one of us who had called out the greeting, and he said, “Well, hello to you too, my little friends.” We burst out laughing, poking each other in delight. Did we just make friends with an American? For days afterward, we couldn’t stop asking our friend to tell us how it felt to attract the attention of a man from America.