At this revelation, we stood up, our voices raised in pained incredulity, this being the first time we’d ever heard such a thing. The Cute One begged us to calm down. He said the entire world agreed with us: no government had the right to make such claims. But until the day His Excellency agreed with us, he added, Pexton would not be leaving.
We told Thula this in our letter.
We told her that, based on the Sweet One’s statement, we did not believe Pexton would ever clean up or leave our land; our children and their children would in all certainty live forever amid their poison. We told her we did not understand why the Restoration Movement was regurgitating such nonsense to us—the fact that they were doing so made us wonder how much our suffering pained them. How hard could we trust them to fight for us, considering that their most powerful weapon was words? Wasn’t it time we stopped using words and tried something else, something altogether new?
We did not receive a response from Thula for several months.
The day we finally did was a rainy day when we’d all stayed home. She told us, in her letter, that the cold season had left the city and it was now close to warm, though not as hot as she wished. She’d done better in her classes than she had hoped. Then she said:
Remember that meeting I told you I was going to attend in my last letter? The one in the place called the Village? My friend was right, nothing about the place reminded me of Kosawa, but I cannot tell you how much the meeting energized me. The moment I left there I began writing this letter in my head, eager to tell you everything I’d witnessed. The people at this meeting were there to talk about what we could do about corporations like Pexton. These people were not like the ones at the Restoration Movement, talking about how we can peacefully bring about change with dialogue, negotiation, common ground, more dialogue. No, these people were angry. One man stood up and spoke of a place many days’ travel by car from New York, this place has pipelines too. The pipelines are not spilling like ours, but the people there do not want them crossing their land, they say pipelines are a calamity waiting to happen. Their government disagrees, so these people have to live with the pipelines just as we have to. Pipelines, in America—can you believe such a thing? The pipelines here run under the ground, but the people say it doesn’t matter—simply having them deprives their land of its sanctity. But their government is not concerned about the sanctity of their land. In this country, governments and corporations are friends too. Over here, governments also sit back and do nothing while corporations chain people up and throw them in bondage.
And there’s another place, on the other side of the country, where children are drinking poisoned water. The government knew the water was poisoned and did nothing about it. Listening to this, I thought I was in some bizarre dream in which America had revealed itself to be Kosawa. The stories were endless. There’s also an area south of here, where land is disappearing into the sea. Every day land the size of a small village is lost, all because oil corporations have the liberty to do as they please and the government chooses to do little while its citizens watch helplessly. I could hardly breathe as I listened to these stories about small corporations and big corporations, about government offices that said one thing when something else was the case, about representatives who told people nothing was wrong though they knew disaster was approaching. We knew we were not the only ones in our country, but could you have ever imagined that such things are happening to people in great countries too?
I’d long thought that our problem was that we were weak, lack of knowledge our greatest incapacity. My father, my uncle, all those who stood up for Kosawa and lost their lives, I thought they failed because they were unschooled in the ways of the world. I promised myself after the massacre that I would acquire knowledge and turn it into a machete that would destroy all those who treat us like vermin. I badly wanted to grow up so that I could protect Kosawa and ensure that children of the future never suffer like we did. Knowledge, I believed, would give Kosawa power. But these Americans, with their abundance of knowledge, how could they be powerless too? How is it that their government, which is supposed to be their servant, is acting as their master? From the books I read in our last years at Lokunja, I’d come to believe that if we could design a democratic government, just as is the case in America, our country would be a wonderful place to live in. But now that I live here I’m realizing that something far more complex is going on all over the world, something that binds us to these beset Americans and others like us in villages and town and cities in nations big and small. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it all out, and nothing will be the same after we do.