How Beautiful We Were

by Imbolo Mbue

“We’re not stupid,” Lusaka says. “We know Bézam is where evil has built its house and where it raises its children.

Our people were dying for lack of knowledge, they said, and if a child of ours could go to America and bring knowledge back to us, someday no government or corporation would be able to do to us the things they’ve been doing to us.

What happened will never unhappen, she liked to say; what is to happen will happen—better you focus on what’s happening in front of you.

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.