In the square, Sahel later told me, the soldiers made all of the boys and men kneel down and clasp their hands on their heads. The soldiers pointed guns at the backs of their skulls and asked for the whereabouts of the missing child. No one said a word. They asked again. No response. If the males remained quiet, the soldiers said, they would start shooting. Sonni, made to kneel alongside all the others, finally spoke. In his trembling voice, he told the soldiers that no one in Kosawa knew anything about this child, that he was telling the truth. He swore on his mother’s grave. A soldier walked over to him and put a gun to his temple. Sonni closed his eyes, his hands still clasped on his head. His lips quivered as he struggled to prevent the entire village from seeing him cry. He swore to the soldiers that if he got any information about the child’s whereabouts he would come to Lokunja. The soldiers asked him to swear again, on the graves of all of his ancestors. His father, my brother, old as he was, he was kneeling too, beside his son—the soldiers had deemed him strong enough to commit a crime, even though he walked with a cane. Sonni swore three times, louder every time. His own son was kneeling not too far from him—the son who was one of the young men heaping this new tribulation upon Kosawa.
The soldiers, guns still pointed, told everyone in the square to consider their ways. They said that if they deemed it necessary they would gun down every living thing in the village, babies and animals included, and no one would lay a hand on them.
They got into their cars and left.
Sonni pulled himself up. He was shaking.
“Why?” he shouted, looking at the young men beside him, his arms flung wide in frustration. “Why are you doing this to your own people? Haven’t we suffered enough? We’re so close to putting an end to all this and having the peace we’ve long been waiting for. Why ruin our chances when we have good people in America fighting for us?”
“Where are the results of their efforts?” one of the young men shouted.
“Let the soldiers kill us if they want to,” another young man added. “Is it death you’re afraid of? If we’re not afraid of death at our age, why should you be at yours?”
“But why entice death when there’s still a chance at life?” Sonni cried.
No one was listening. Angry voices, including his own son’s, were drowning his, shouting back at him that the Sweet One and the Cute One were saying useless things, they were weak talkers. Wait, wait, patience, patience—that’s all they’ve ever said. How long should Kosawa wait?
It was clear that morning that, even though few in Kosawa would have left their beds at night to burn and break, many got satisfaction from what the young men were doing. Anger that should have been levied upon these young men was directed at Sonni, for whatever choices Sonni had made that had forced the young men to take matters into their own hands.
When Sahel recounted this story to me, I wished Manga had said a word in support of his son instead of keeping his head bowed throughout the lambasting, but Sahel told me that Sonni was not without his supporters—men of his father’s generation and some from his own had also rebuked their sons, telling them that they were idiots to believe that Kosawa could singlehandedly defeat Pexton, that they must have forgotten what happened where they were standing, on that afternoon a decade ago.
* * *
—
Last week Sonni and the Sweet One came to see Sahel.
They took a seat in my room, on the bench across from my bed. For a few minutes we tried not to talk about anything heavy, but few topics in Kosawa are soft in nature these days. During one pause, the Sweet One asked Sonni if the child who had disappeared from Gardens had yet to be found. Sonni shook his head. The Sweet One asked no more questions on the matter. We were silent again, until Sahel came to join us.
The Sweet One cleared his throat.
He said he wanted to tell Sahel something but he needed to say it in front of Sonni, so that Sonni could be his witness that he had told Sahel the whole truth. What he’d traveled from Bézam to talk about, he said, was very important: the young newspaperman from America, Bongo’s friend, had written a letter about Thula.
I still remember the young man from America and his pretty face—he was good to Bongo, he was good to all of us. The Sweet One said the young man wanted us to know that he liked Thula. I looked at Sahel. We were both trying to suppress our laughter. This was confirmation of what we’d talked about after the last letter from Thula that the Cute One had read to us. In it, Thula had mentioned this young man several times, talking about how he made America feel like home to her. We did not want Thula to marry a foreigner, but if this man did not marry her, who else would? We knew her marriage to him would be fraught with misunderstandings, considering the different traditions that had shaped them, but we’d still thank him for saving Thula from the life we oftentimes feared might be hers. Thula, with a husband. Imagine such a thing.