How Beautiful We Were

by Imbolo Mbue

“Someday, when you’re old, you’ll see that the ones who came to kill us and the ones who’ll run to save us are the same. No matter their pretenses, they all arrive here believing they have the power to take from us or give to us whatever will satisfy their endless wants.”

You know that’s how he is, Yaya always said with a shrug whenever I went to her to complain about my father’s uncontrollable anger; you know he’s not good at being happy. But why? I would ask. Because he was born that way, Bongo—that’s why. But how come everyone else in the village smiles and he’s the only person who never smiles? Because he’s the way he is; why should he pretend he’s like everyone else?

The pipelines here run under the ground, but the people say it doesn’t matter—simply having them deprives their land of its sanctity. But their government is not concerned about the sanctity of their land. In this country, governments and corporations are friends too. Over here, governments also sit back and do nothing while corporations chain people up and throw them in bondage.

From the books I read in our last years at Lokunja, I’d come to believe that if we could design a democratic government, just as is the case in America, our country would be a wonderful place to live in. But now that I live here I’m realizing that something far more complex is going on all over the world, something that binds us to these beset Americans and others like us in villages and town and cities in nations big and small. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it all out, and nothing will be the same after we do.

Only now, as I lie on this dying-bed, do I realize it: life is funny. People fighting over a piece of land that none of them can take along when death comes—how is that not funny?

We could sit on the veranda for hours without saying a word to each other and I would feel as if I’d had the most enchanting conversation. Only with him did I come to realize how much noise there is in the world, and how marvelous it is not to be a part of it.

Oh, dear husband, I fear that, like you, Thula walks around consumed by all the ways the world has failed to protect its children. Like you, she seems doomed never to find peace until a new earth is born, one in which all are accorded the same level of dignity. How I ache for you both—you for the joy you never had, Thula for the disappointment that is surely coming her way.

We cried for the child too, as we did for our own children, the burden he would have to bear for the things done and undone to those before him. His life, like the lives of our descendants, in good ways and bad ways, would be only a continuation of our story—nothing could save him from that.