When Konga showed up that night at the village meeting brandishing the Pexton men’s key, I was at first aghast at his tactic and manners. I was thinking what my friends were thinking: Is this the right way to get what we want? Wouldn’t it be best for us to wait for a better time to do this, perhaps a day in the future after we’d mapped out a step-by-step strategy rather than initiating a spontaneous rebellion based on a mysterious whim? I still can’t say how I persuaded myself to obey the orders of someone who wields no power over the words coming out of his mouth, but the words were the ones we needed to hear that evening. I needed to hear them. My brother had said them to me, and I’d refused to listen to him. I’d let him travel to Bézam without my support on a journey where he could have benefited from my faith and counsel. I couldn’t let him down again.
After my friends and I had dragged away and dumped the Pexton men and Woja Beki in a corner of Lusaka’s parlor, Woja Beki cried out, upon hearing Konga tell us to bind their hands and feet and throw them in the back room, “Konga Wanjika, son of Bantu Wanjika, what did I ever do to you to deserve such treatment…？”
I say similar words whenever I look at a mother collapsed in grief beside a dead child: Enemies of Kosawa, what did we ever do to you to deserve such treatment?
Many nights I lie in bed and imagine myself turning into a fan, blowing away the air over Kosawa, driving it past the hills behind Gardens, dumping it where strong winds will take it afar and bring back to us good air. I picture myself a wall that stretches from the sky to the inner core of the earth, allowing no pipelines to pass through, no poison to flow into our water. I want to give the children simple things. Clean water. Clean air. Clean food. Let them soil it if they like it dirty—how dare anyone refuse them this right?
* * *
I AM NEITHER KOSAWA’S BEST hunter nor farmer, and I won’t be an elder for decades. Yet, after the soldiers left, the men of my village chose me to be their leader.
Lusaka stood in front of our gathering that evening and declared that we needed a new, fearless leader. An age-mate of my brother’s named Tunis offered his services, but nobody was enthused about anointing him—passionate as he is, he enjoys a good laugh far too much, and he has newborn twin daughters at home, a life change certain to do nothing to make a man manlier. My cousin Sonni offered too; his father, my uncle Manga, agreed that his son, wise since birth, would make a great leader. But someone shouted that it wasn’t right for a father to nominate his son. An argument was about to ensue over who had the right to nominate whom when Lusaka raised his hand to ask for silence. In the same spot where he’d asked us to take the Pexton men to his hut, he told everyone that he believed I should be the leader. He said no one present had done more for Kosawa in the past year. Several men nodded. No one stood up to counter him.
I wanted to stand and say the same about him, but he spoke without pause, giving me no space to slide my words between his. The reasons were many why he wanted me to lead, he said. I’d participated in digging a grave for every child who had died in the past two years. （About this he was wrong—after Elali told me she no longer loved me, I’d sat in my bedroom and stared at the wall a full day, disregarding Malabo’s pleas that I eat, ignoring the wails coming from a hut where a nine-month-old boy had gone to sleep and never woken up. I hadn’t gone to that baby’s funeral or cared to know his name.）
Lusaka said I’d orchestrated the search for the vanished men in Bézam （I’d indeed assembled the search party and led the way around Bézam, but I’d done it not for Kosawa, but for my brother and my family）。 He added, incorrectly, that I’d been among the first to step forward when Konga called for volunteers to drag away the Pexton men （I was at the back of the pack of young men who went to the front）。 When, on that night of the village meeting, as per Konga’s order, I arrived in front of the twins’ hut and realized that some of the men of Kosawa weren’t there, Lusaka continued—pointing at all of the cowards, their faces turned away—I’d gone to their huts and dragged them from beneath their wives’ skirts, but not before telling their wives and children what the men were: cowering, wet chickens; phonies undeserving of the good in their lives （I’d said no such things. I’d only told the men that they had to come with me, though I now wish I’d insulted them inside their huts—no able man who sits at home while other men go to fight and die for his family is deserving of the honor of being called a man）。