He asked if we had any more questions.
We did not. Whatever hope we’d had at the onset of that meeting had flown away and taken with it our last words. With a final smile, he thanked us for coming. The Round One and the Sick One began packing up their briefcases. Their driver was waiting by our school in a black Land Rover, ready to take them back to Bézam, to their homes and lives overflowing with clean necessities and superfluities we could never conjure.
Woja Beki stood up and thanked us too. He wished us a good night and reminded us to return for another meeting in eight weeks. He told us to be well until then.
On most nights we would have left the village square and turned homeward.
We would have said little to each other as we walked in the darkness, our entire beings drenched with an unrelenting, smothering form of despair. We would have walked slowly, our heads hung low, ashamed we’d dared to hope, embarrassed by our smallness.
On any other night, the meeting would have been a reminder that we could do nothing to them but they could do anything to us, because they owned us. Their words would have served no purpose but to further instill within us that we couldn’t undo the fact that three decades before, in Bézam, on a date we’ll never know, at a meeting where none of us was present, our government had given us to Pexton. Handed, on a sheet of paper, our land and waters to them. We would have had no choice but to accept that we were now theirs. We would have admitted to ourselves that we’d long ago been defeated.
On that night, though, that night when the air was too still and the crickets strangely quiet, we did not turn homeward. Because, at the moment we were about to stand and start bidding each other good night, we heard a rustle in the back of the gathering. We heard a voice telling us to remain seated, the meeting was not yet over, it was just beginning. We turned around and saw a man, tall and lean, hair matted, wearing nothing but a pair of trousers with holes on every side. It was Konga, our village madman.
He was breathing heavily, as if he’d sprinted from the school compound to the square. He was exuberant and bouncy, not his usual lethargic self, the self that lumbered around the village laughing with invisible friends and shaking his fists at enemies no one else could perceive. We saw the glow in his eyes in the light darkness, his excitement apparent as he rushed to the front of the gathering, nearly floating in exhilaration. We looked at each other, too dumbfounded to ask: What is he doing?
Never had we seen the Leader so stunned as when he turned to Woja Beki and asked what Konga wanted—why was a madman disrupting the end of his meeting? Never had we seen Woja Beki as devoid of words as when he turned to face Konga.
Before us all stood a never-before-seen version of our village madman.
As if all authority on earth belonged to him, Konga barked at the Pexton men, told them to sit down, hadn’t they heard him, were their ears so full of wax that sound couldn’t penetrate it? The meeting wasn’t over, it was just beginning.
The Leader, maddened by Konga’s audacity, and running short on the decorum he’d brought from Bézam, reciprocated the bark, asking how dare a madman speak to him, Pexton’s representative, in that manner. Konga chuckled, before responding that he had the right to speak to anyone any way he liked, an answer that prompted the Leader to turn to Woja Beki and demand to know why Woja Beki was standing there like an idiot, tolerating this insolent fool. Konga cleared his throat—everything in it—and spat out what we imagined was a glob of dark yellow phlegm between the Leader’s feet.
We gasped. Did Konga know who the men were and what they could do to him?
The Leader glared at Konga. Then us. Then Konga again. He motioned for his underlings to pick up their briefcases. All three men lifted their briefcases and turned to leave. We took a deep breath, thankful the drama had reached its finale, but our relief morphed into greater perplexity when Konga asked the trio how they intended to return to Bézam. The representatives turned around, puzzled, if not alarmed.
What happened next, we could never have expected. Could never have imagined Konga would put a hand inside his trousers in front of the Pexton men and the village. Our mothers and grandmothers covered their eyes, afraid he was about to do a thing women should not witness, the thing they’d told us to never look at if Konga did it in front of us.
We kept our eyes open and watched as Konga caressed something in his trousers, his lips parted, stroking, stroking, no doubt an exaggeration. Gently, he pulled out something. He held it up and asked the men if it belonged to them. Our eyes widened, as did the men’s—they’d recognized their car key, golden and glossy, in the madman’s hand.
Before we could recover from the revelation, Konga asked the Pexton men where their driver was. The driver always waited in the car during the meetings, but with the key in Konga’s hand, where could he be? Konga did not say. He merely, with a smile, informed the men that the key in his hand was indeed their car key and when they returned to the school compound they would not find their driver waiting.
We began talking all at once. What was happening? What was he doing?
Woja Beki started stuttering, bowing to the Leader, informing him that Konga was only playing a madman’s game, the Leader should please
