—
On my first visit to the prison, which I made with one of my aunts, every woman in the room had jumped up when the guard opened the door to let in the men. I ran to Bongo and held him, feeling the bones that had taken prominence now that much of his flesh had thinned off. He looked worse than I’d feared, more than twice his twenty-eight years. His lively eyes had turned cloudy and shriveled into a permanent squint. After he and I had hugged and cried and hugged and cried some more, we dried our eyes. My aunt led us to the bench, cautioning us that we didn’t want to spend the entire visiting hour standing in one spot crying, and, besides, did we want the other women to take news back home about how suspicious our extended hug had looked and how odd it was that a woman would hug her dead husband’s brother for so long? Bongo had burst out laughing, but quickly stopped, perhaps at the remembrance that said brother was Malabo. I told him about Yaya, after we’d sat down and wiped our eyes again and blown our noses—I told him how Yaya wasn’t eating. He wept. I gave him the food Yaya had made for him. He laughed when he saw that she had put mushrooms in the chicken stew, even though Yaya thought mushrooms were bad for one’s health; she’d done it to give him what little joy she could.
All around the room, I heard wives urging their husbands to eat, eat, there would still be enough leftovers for the coming days. Bongo and Woja Beki and Lusaka always shared their food with each other, and we all made sure to bring a bowl for Konga, though the prison guards never allowed us to see him. We hoped the guards would give him the food, but if evidence had existed that they didn’t give it to him, we wouldn’t have stopped bringing it anyway—Konga was one of us; we couldn’t not try to feed him.
Out of spite, or out of fear, the prison guards kept Konga in a shed at the back of the prison, a structure that used to house the prison dog until it died. Bongo told me that, though all the prisoners lived in one expansive room, eating and sleeping on mats lined from end to end, dressing in each other’s presence after bathing in the prison yard, Konga stayed alone all day and night in this shed, a chain around his neck, chains around his legs, chains around his waist, chains wrapped so tightly he couldn’t do anything but drink water and eat whatever the guards tossed to him if they were moved to be merciful. Their generosity never rose to the level of letting him step outside the shed, not even to feel the warmth of the Bézam sun for a clipped second. It was in the shed that he urinated, and it was there he excreted, in a hole they’d made Bongo and Lusaka dig on the opposite end from where Konga slept on the deceased dog’s blanket.
Day after day, Bongo told me, Konga begged to be set free. On the nights when the guards couldn’t enjoy a good rest because of Konga’s unrelenting pleas to have the chains taken off, the guards stormed into his shed. Every prisoner could hear Konga crying as he asked the guards, while they kicked and stomped on him with their heavy boots, who they were, why they were doing what they were doing to him, questions that only made the guards more determined to break and tame him, teach the foul-smelling fool a lesson. When Konga sang, however, the guards did not strike him—they seemed to find pleasure in his songs, songs that were always about a faraway place he’d never been to but had heard of, a place where the rivers tasted like honey and the grass grew so green it could be eaten raw; a place where the laughter of children echoed and voluptuous women made stupendous meals; oh, if someone could show him the way to that place. As he sang, his voice rising in rapture, it was clear his spirit was already arriving in that place. The guards, amused, would taunt him, telling him that they knew the place, but as a prisoner he couldn’t visit it—if Konga was as powerful as they’d heard, why wouldn’t he free himself and go to the place and get himself a fine woman and some sweet water?
I had known, with the Sick One’s death, that our situation was about to get dangerously complex, but I’d also hoped that Austin’s arrival would cause something incredible to happen and absolve us of our role in the death.
As I was walking back from the burial ground with most of the village, I sent a silent prayer to the Spirit to spare my children and me, whatever might befall. My eyes were lifted up to the hills when someone toward the front shouted: Soldiers.
Quiet descended.
Children ran and hid behind their mothers.
Soldiers were in the square. Nine of them. Nine guns drawn and pointed at us. One of the soldiers shouted for us to approach.
We walked toward them, into the square. We stood in front of them, all of us except Austin. While we were still frozen, he had managed to escape their watch and dashed off to observe from behind a hut. It was from his hiding place that he took off the camera he’d been carrying around his neck. With this camera he began darting from the back of one hut to another, clicking, clicking. Only later, after the burials, would we learn he had taken pictures of
