We gathered in the village square to hear them talk, not because we cared to but because our woja at the time believed all European men had guns—why risk being killed if we could simply lend them our ears for an hour? Their interpreter, a young man from the third of the five sister-villages, began the meeting with a song. Clapping his hands, he sang with his eyes lifted to the sky about someone who once walked on water, a man who had twelve friends who followed him everywhere—the song made no sense. When he was done singing, the European men delivered a message of how we would live a better life after we died if we turned our backs on our Spirit and chose their Spirit. “You have no ancestors waiting for you in the next world,” they said to us. “Your ancestors are burning in a fire—do you want to join them there?” They did not tell us why their Spirit would throw us in a fire when we hadn’t done anything to offend it. We wondered, as we listened to them, why their Spirit was so bitter and irrational. If we closed our eyes and said some words in prayer, the men said, their Spirit would become our Spirit. After we died, instead of joining our ancestors in the fire and burning with them for an everlasting night, we would spend our afterlives in a place where there was no night, just one glorious morning, a place where the roads were straight and shiny, and the gardens had the most beautiful flowers. Everyone loved each other there, and a choir in shiny white robes never stopped singing.
You should have seen how hard my father and the other men of Kosawa laughed after that meeting. This wasn’t the first time they’d listened to such talk, but it never ceased to tickle them. They laughed even harder whenever news reached us of how someone we knew in another village had chosen the Spirit of the European men after considering what life in the fire would be like—no water to drink, everyone crying, no one sleeping. One relative, desperate to avoid these European flames, had thrown his family’s umbilical-cord bundle into a fire, believing its power to be false, convinced that the only true power in the world rested with men from Europe and their Spirit. Though the likes of him were few, it revealed to me even then the fickleness of the heart of man.
I remember my father and his brother wiping their eyes after a long laugh. They couldn’t understand how any man whose head bore a large enough brain could believe such nonsense as an everlasting fire. But they wouldn’t have laughed if they’d recalled that, for generations, a different sort of fire had been burning down our way of life.
Kosawa was spared when men began arriving from the coast looking for humans to snatch and sell, but we should have known we wouldn’t always be spared calamities coming from afar. The snatchers came generations before I was born. My grandmother told me about them—the story had been passed down to her of the time when men and women from distant villages appeared in Kosawa bloodied and in tears, bearing accounts of how young and old alike had been thrown into chains. The sick had been left behind to die alone, babies flung on the ground so their mothers could be dragged away with warm milk flowing down from their breasts. Those who had escaped had run for countless days before stumbling into Kosawa, their clothes turned to rags. Many more of them made it to one of our sibling-villages. Still in shock, they told our ancestors that they ought to be prepared—Kosawa or one of the sibling-villages was bound to be next.
Our ancestors fed the escapees, and allowed them to make a home among us; their descendants live in our midst to this day, though their blood has long since been diluted by ours. From what my grandmother told me, our ancestors sharpened their spears and created flight paths in the forest. They told their children what to do if the time did come. But the snatchers never arrived. Still, the fear of it happening remained across the eight villages. With every arrival of a new group of escapees presenting stories of villages emptied out by snatchers, our ancestors made more spears and machetes, though the escapees told them that such weapons would be of no use, the snatchers had a thing that spat fire and could fell a man with one click. Even after new escapees stopped arriving, men rarely went alone into the forest to hunt. Mothers told their children to be good boys and girls, lest the snatchers come for them. Few were those who slept soundly through the night. For many years, Kosawa was shrouded in disquiet.
Today I hear children joke about it as they play; they say, Do this, or stop doing that, otherwise the snatchers will come for you. Their friends laugh, and I know they do so only because we were spared. In my girlhood, young women even had a song about a maiden who could find no husband and prayed that the Spirit would send a snatcher for her, a man who would seize her out of her father’s hut and, upon seeing her face, make her his and cast off the
