Do it, knowing you have my blessings. I only ask that you harm no humans; we’ll never become killers like them, because the blood of noble men flows in our veins. I’ll send you what money I can to help, and I’ll pray the Spirit to watch over you.
I’ll always be one of us,
Thula
Yaya
IF THERE IS ONE REGRET I have about my marriage, it’s how little I laughed. So much to laugh about in life, and yet I deprived myself. Why? Because my love for my husband demanded that I not bask in bliss while he tottered in sorrow? Because, what really is there to laugh about in this world? But there’s so much to laugh about. Only now, as I lie on this dying-bed, do I realize it: life is funny. People fighting over a piece of land that none of them can take along when death comes—how is that not funny? Everyone wanting something to make them happy, only to realize once they get it that they want something else to make them happy—how is that not funny? Life is a chase after the wind, meaningless, ridiculous. How could that have eluded me? Why did this world become amusing only when I realized I was about to leave it? Perhaps it’s because I now have nothing but time to spend thinking about how sad it is that I didn’t long ago realize it and laugh more. Alas, it’s too late for me to start doing so—the closer death gets, the less I care about the present. My thoughts are mostly of the past, the things I’ve seen. On sleepless nights, as I await a new day exactly like the old one, I think of the events that laid the setting for what would happen to my family, to my village. I think of stories my husband used to tell me on his better days, like how he once spent two weeks on a beach.
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He was young back then, several years before we met. Three men from Europe were passing through Lokunja, on their way from Bézam, heading to the coast, where they would get on their boat to sail back home. They had lost one of their guides and were looking for a hard worker to serve as replacement; my husband heard about the opportunity from someone who knew about his discipline and thought he’d be good at it. This was long before he moved to Kosawa to work for Woja Bewa, taking care of his farm. He knew a guide job had its benefits but, like the rest of us, he was wary of men from Europe, these men who had come to make themselves masters over us. Soon, though, he found out that the men were going to pay him well and that his duties would take him to the ocean. He’d never been near the ocean; no one from our area had ever seen it. We knew it existed a great distance away, but not many of us wondered about it—we had streams and rivers, they were sufficient. But my husband wanted to experience more than was sufficient. So, fearful though he was of what unstated dangers might be involved in the guide job, he agreed to do it for a chance to see the ocean.
The day he set out with the men was the first time he’d ever been in a car.
He and the other guide traveled in the open space in the back of the car. In those days our country was mostly a landscape of densely packed trees, an odd village here and there, not much to see. My husband made a fire and cooked for the European men whenever their group stopped to spend the night in villages along the way or, if there were no villages in sight as darkness approached, in whatever seemingly safe spot the group settled in along the forest paths. His co-guide was from the Bézam area and had a sharp ear; the man had learned English and served as the Europeans’ interpreter throughout the trip. The co-guide instructed my husband on how warm to make the men’s bathing water, how long to roast whatever creature he’d spotted and killed for them, how to prepare and serve the dried fruits and sweet things the Europeans had brought from their country. The guide told my husband that the Europeans and their friends, stationed in towns around the country, were people of great curiosity. He said that the Europeans had traveled here to understand what kind of people we were, why we behaved the way we did, how they could help us so we could live better lives.
My husband let the other guide talk for most of the trip; it made the hours spent bobbing in the back of the car more bearable. Besides, the man couldn’t have been silenced—he seemed incapable of keeping to himself the wonderful changes these European men had brought to the country. In his estimation, the Europeans’ arrival had carried the brightness of dawn. Despite there being much he didn’t like about his masters—how they spoke to him as if he were a dog, for example—he loved that they were giving him a chance to separate himself from his age-mates. His eyes shone when he talked about strolling around his village wearing clothes his masters had given him, the looks of envy his friends gave him, close as he was to becoming a European man himself. Though he missed his wife’s cooking when he traveled, he enjoyed eating his masters’ leftover food and drinking whatever alcohol they couldn’t finish, even if the drink was nowhere as good as palm wine. He hoped the masters’ mission would be successful. If everything went according to their plans, he said, people in every village in our country would soon be speaking English and wearing fine clothes and reading books and eating sweet things and owning cars, and maybe, he added wistfully, a child of his would one day own a car too, and he would get to sit in the front, no longer in the back.