We had learned from Thula that Austin had become a monk and was living in a neighboring country. He left America the year after Thula returned home, months after he buried his father. Thula told us he had described his new life as the most joyous form of existence he had ever known—having no possessions, living in stillness, daily tending to a garden to help feed children at a nearby orphanage. Even with no chance of a life together, the two of them shared love letters in which they professed that their spirits will be forever united, and that living their callings had freed them to love each other without conditions.
Holding a pregnant Nubia’s hand, his voice trembling, Juba read Austin’s poem:
farewell to the revolution, weep not, silence lasts for a night
rise children, get in formation, madness ignited, fists clench up
burn, burn, burn; lift every voice; alive and proud—or give us death
ten thousand systems, sipping on our souls, onward yet we fight, until when
long may we live to see that glorious morning, when the light shall emerge
when we’ll gather, at the river, in the village pure and clean
there’ll be no more crying, no more bleeding, no more sickness, only bliss
oh boundless love, we are weary, won’t you come forth, guide us home?
—
Pexton created a scholarship in honor of the overseer and his wife, the Augustine and Evelyn Fish Memorial Peace and Prosperity Scholarship. The scholarship was for our children only. It would allow them to go to the best schools and someday become learned, like Thula. There was no land left to fight for, so Pexton had no fear that our children might grow up to wage a war against them. They’d already begun digging a new well in what used to be our village square when they announced the scholarship. They’d already uprooted what was left of the mango tree under which we’d played—whatever hadn’t turned to ashes.
Most of our children got the scholarships.
We paid nothing for their education; Pexton made sure of that. After finishing at the school in Lokunja, they moved to bigger towns or to Bézam, where they went to schools of higher learning, living and eating where they studied. Some of them got into the government leadership school, others into lesser places of advanced learning. Many traveled to Europe and America, to study on other scholarships, or to start new lives.
Today, in the year 2020, forty years since the night Konga told us to rise, our children have good jobs with our government, with corporations in Europe and America. They live in lovely houses. They drive new cars. They’ve given us grandchildren. Several of us have been to America. Our children buy us nice things to show their gratitude.
—
Sometimes we ask our children about the cars they drive. The cars seem to be bigger than they’ve ever been, needing more oil. Do they think about it, about the children who will suffer as we once did just so they can have all the oil they want? Do they worry whether a day will come when there’ll be no more oil left under the earth? They chuckle at our questions. They tell us that oil is still a thousand years away from depletion, by then no one would need it. We nod; we agree that a thousand years is too far away for anyone to worry.
We have now begun our entrance into the last decades of our lives.
It marvels us how much suffering we bore, our parents bore, our ancestors bore, so our children could own cars and forget Kosawa. They do not speak our language to their children. They speak to them only in English. They do not recognize our Spirit, a rejection that surely makes our ancestors weep. They go to churches, if they have any awareness of a Spirit at all. They believe in a Spirit in the sky when ours lives within them. Some of us had taken our families’ umbilical-cord bundles before we fled Kosawa, hoping to pass them on to our children, but they have no use for them. For births and deaths and marriages, they celebrate in the ways of our former masters. They dance to their music, as if ours was merely a relic to be admired. They have village meetings, occasionally, but it isn’t to talk about how to keep alive their ancestors’ spirits, or how to revive Kosawa in any form. No, their meetings are to plan dinner parties where they laugh about things we don’t understand. One day, we know, our world and our ways will vanish in totality.
All the seven villages now have electricity. Most of us live in brick houses. Many of us have cellphones and flat-screen televisions. In Lokunja you can use the thing called the Internet to read about our story, or see huts like the ones in which we were born.
—
It may be long dead, Kosawa, but we never forget it, the splendid piece of the earth it was. We can never forget it, for there our spirits were whole. Amid oil spills and gas flares, we looked behind us and saw green hills where twin mambas hissed in gaiety, where robust moles and porcupines zigzagged before falling prey to the hunter’s precision. We lived in a place where caterpillars took twice as long to renovate into heavy butterflies. Ours was a village where the sky sang thunderous songs in the dry season, songs that made us wrap our legs around our siblings in fright and in delight. There were dire rainy days, when the rivers threatened to take our possessions to their resting place, and parched days, when the ground in the hills cracked from thirst and the palm trees rejoiced. Through it all, Kosawa remained a singular place—if not for the beauty of our surroundings, then for the people who called it home. How could we not want
