“Well, there you have your statement with our chief’s interpretation.” Mama Kadie sighed and continued, addressing the chief by her first name. “Hawa, this is your land, too, and I am sure that fragments of the wisdom of our ancestors remain within you. Your eyes tell me that you do not believe what you say. We do want our people to have jobs that provide better lives for them and their children. We want improvements—but not ones that destroy our spirits, our traditions, and literally kill us while we are still alive. Goodbye now.”
As Mama Kadie turned to walk away, one of the private security guards tried to lay hands on her, pointing his gun at her as a deterrent. To the surprise of everyone, including the security fellow, a young police officer standing next to him released some blows to his head, knocking the security fellow to the ground. The police officer was quickly contained with gun butt strikes to his head. His bleeding head landed on the dusty ground, but his face seemed content as he watched the elders walk away. No clouds moved in the sky. The wind had nothing to speak of. Only the sounds of the visitors’ feet could be heard. They left with tears in all of their eyes, especially the elders.
If only it was during the war. We would have solved this situation rightly, as we, too, would have had weapons.
Ernest and Miller looked at each other with eyes of kinship that spoke the quiet language of their thoughts.
Back in Imperi, the crowd waited for news. When the elders emerged from the path through the old town, they said nothing at first. Their faces silenced the crowd and people knew that the wind of happiness had not danced their way today. Mama Kadie went home, leaving the explanations to Pa Moiwa and Pa Kainesi. They told the crowd what had passed in few words, their tongues gripped with sorrow and helplessness. The next day, all the men who worked for the company who had participated in finding the source of the river’s disruption were sacked without reason or pay. They came home with only the smells of their labor on their bodies. The only thing they could do was sell their work boots, overalls, and hats to other workers whose clothes had been stolen.
A week after the men were fired, a good number of them were sent to jail. They had gone at night to the parked machines at the clearing sights and with rubber hoses sucked petrol out of the machines into plastic gallons to sell in order to feed their families.
They were caught and badly beaten by the private security guards, then dragged into the backs of trucks that took them to the police station. The police didn’t take reports or question why the men were bleeding. They locked them up for a few days, then transferred them to another prison somewhere in the country without telling their families.
When Ernest and Miller first returned, Colonel had not been able to sit with them to hear in full detail what had happened because their firewood business was in great demand. Finally, at the end of that week, after the last meal of the day, Colonel was ready. “Tell me all that happened during the visit to the paramount chief. Tell me everything—even what you don’t think is important,” Colonel commanded, and the others left the three of them sitting together deep into the night as Colonel listened intently to Ernest and Miller, his body erect and his face stern, allowing no emotions to pass over it.
8
THE EVENINGS NOW BEGAN
with truckloads of men returning from work. Most, if not all, went straight to the bar, where they would be joined shortly by the men who lived in company quarters. Their conversations made no sense—they shouted one another down midsentence—and the noise took over the evening serenity of the town.
Here in Imperi, nights used to be welcomed with the warmest of handshakes. There were visits with friends, and stories told by elders later in the night were a way for the heart to cleanse itself for whatever the following day might bring. But gentle people could no longer enjoy the arrival of evening. That sweetness had been soured by the behavior of drunkards in their midst. It was as though the workers, foreign and local, came to the bar to cure their torments by releasing their anger on the unfortunate townspeople. At the beginning of the evening, they sat on the open veranda of the bar, facing the road that divided the old and new parts of town. As the alcohol diluted their blood and falsely strengthened their belief that they could get away with anything, they began letting loose their unwanted natures, calling out to women and girls who walked by on their way to buy kerosene, fetch water, or perform some other function for their families.
“Woman, here is money, I will pay you to spend the night with me,” a local man said.
“I am married, and even if I wasn’t, you are out of line and must use your tongue properly if you are ever going to get a woman,” the woman passing by said. The response didn’t deter the fellow, and his friends egged him on. He took a gulp of his beer, wiped his mouth in the palm of his hands, and headed after the woman. “I will pay your husband, too, to loan you to me for the night.” He pulled more money from his pocket and displayed it in the open.
Such behaviors would go on for a while, and as the men got drunker, they began walking out of the bar to physically touch women in places that one must ask and be granted permission to touch. The men got so aggressive that they even pulled down the wrappers of the women. The first time this happened, the woman ran home and brought her husband, brothers, and uncles, and they attacked the fellow who had misbehaved. His drunken friends came to his aid and a big fight started that ended with several wounded men. That was the first incident, and the police didn’t come to arrest anyone then. But more and more of these situations occurred, and the fights got more violent, and bystanders began getting hurt from bottles flying out from the fracas. That’s when the police started coming. But they arrested only the local people, especially those who didn’t work for the company. The men responsible were simply sent to their living quarters, being reminded they had work the next morning.
During one such fight, Sila and his children had been walking by when a foreigner let fly a bottle he had broken against a table. It hit Maada and slashed the little boy across his forehead. Sila ran toward the fellow and head-butted him so hard that the man fainted. At that moment, the police vehicle was heard from afar on its way toward Imperi. Someone with a walkie-talkie or mobile phone must have called them.
Ernest, who had been nearby, stepped up to Sila. “Take your child home so you don’t have to go to jail,” he said. Sila hesitated, perhaps deciding whether to trust the boy who had amputated them. But he decided to do as Ernest advised, as his son’s wound needed tending to. Sila pulled his children along while looking back to see what Ernest was going to do, but his eyes lost him in the crowd.
Ernest gathered some big rocks, stepped in the middle of the road, and sat down on his heels so that the light from any incoming vehicle would not reveal his face. As the police vehicle neared, he threw a few of the rocks with such precision and force that he broke the windshield and side mirrors. Then he stood up and ran, under the cover of darkness. The police chased after him, forgetting about the foreigner who had recovered but with a bloody nose. The police couldn’t catch Ernest, and no one told who he was. And the foreigner was embarrassed because a man with just one hand had knocked him down, so he refused to speak to the police.
Sila learned what Ernest had done and wanted to thank him. But he still needed time to be able to shake Ernest’s hands.
* * *
After months of fights at the bar and men being jailed without their families knowing where they were, wives and daughters, without means and desperate, began to take money from foreigners at first, and eventually from anyone, in exchange for their bodies. And soon enough, young women arrived from other parts of the country to do the same, and prostitution became a booming business in Imperi, and the elders could do nothing about it. And since they were powerless, they withdrew themselves from such sights.
One weekend, a group of men—two foreigners and two locals—forcibly took a young woman who was returning from the river carrying a bucket of water. They slowed down their vehicle and offered her a ride into town. She refused, so they grabbed her, threw her in the back, and drove her up the hill to their quarters. Her name was Yinka, and she was not from Imperi, but she could have been anyone’s daughter. The next morning, she was found on the side of the road by the bar, her pelvis broken. Unable to stand, she had dragged herself toward her house but could not get that far. The women came with clothes and covered her bloody and naked body. They carried her home and tended to her, but she didn’t want to be in this world any longer. No one knew where she was from and no one came to claim her body. She was buried and people cried for her because she was someone’s daughter and this could have happened to any other young girl or woman in town. The police did nothing, even when people went to the station to give the names of the four men.
“We know who they are and you do nothing about it! This means you encourage them to do more of such things,” a neighbor of Yinka’s shouted from among the people who had come to the station to demand an investigation. The police threw tear gas into the crowd.
* * *
This town—where not so long ago, even after the war, one allowed one’s daughter to play under the moonlight with other children; where, even though things weren’t even close to perfect, a mother and father didn’t stand barefoot in a pot of hot oil each time their daughter left the house to fetch a bucket of water—this town … what was it now and what would become of its people?
Soon there were rapes that no one spoke of, not only because the women were ashamed but also because the families felt helpless and the only dignity left was silence. Sometimes, the growing belly of a young girl shattered that falsehood and the child she gave birth to had the color of and resembled one of the workers, white or black. Nothing was said about such things. The child became part of Imperi’s forgotten population.
For the moment, there was some laughter coming through the wind. So life still lived here, after all.
* * *
One night, a loud explosion silenced all conversations—even at the bar. People came outside, looking all around for a sign of smoke, but there was nothing, so they returned to what they had been doing. The next morning, there was no water at the mining site or the company quarters, and it took a week before the problem could be found. Someone had dynamited the main water pipe up in the hills under the bushes. The company fixed it, but the water that then came through the faucets and out of the showerheads was contaminated with petrol and rusty murk. For two weeks, it went on like this, then stopped.
That’s when Colonel and Miller ran out of the petrol they had siphoned from the company machines and got tired of bailing the dam water at night. They had fed the dirty dam water and petrol into the water pipe through a hole they had drilled. Miller laughed as they did it; Colonel showed no emotion.
Colonel never showed any emotion—except once. One evening Salimatu came home, her face swollen and her dress torn into pieces; she was almost naked. Colonel pressed her to tell him who the men were who had done this. She did, and though his demeanor didn’t change much, it was the first time that tears came to his eyes, and his entire body trembled with anger. He boiled some water and tended to Salimatu. Then, while she rested, he put his bayonet in his pocket and headed for the bar, stopping at a shop to buy a small can of red paint.
Before going on, he passed by Bockarie’s house and gave Bockarie all of his savings. It was for the others, he said; it was their school fees for the coming year. Then he bought a box of matches from Bockarie’s stand.
“Are you okay, man?” Bockarie sensed something was angering the young man.
“Of course. You know, I learned something during the war.” Colonel moved away from the light of the lamp. “I learned that you are not free until you stop others from making you feel worthless. Because if you do not, you will eventually accept that you are worthless.”
He was gone before Bockarie could find words to respond.
Arriving near the bar, Colonel observed the area carefully. He saw the four men—the two foreigners and two locals, the same men who had assaulted Yinka and now Salimatu and possibly many others. He crouched near their vehicles and with an old cloth he wrote
RAPIST
in capital letters on their cars with the paint. The men were still drinking, laughing, and harassing women who walked by. He waited in the dark where he knew each of them was bound to come when the beer no longer had space to settle in them.
Sure enough, one of the foreigners came to urinate. Colonel attacked with several blows to the man’s temple that made him faint. Colonel dragged the foreigner to the back of the bar, undressed him, and tied his penis with a rope that he attached to the branch of a mango tree. He tore the fellow’s shirt and trousers and used the strips to bind his hands and legs, and gag his mouth. The fellow came to after Colonel was done, and each time he moved, the rope tightened, elongating his privates. His eyes watered but his voice couldn’t go anywhere.
Colonel did the same to two others, tying them to the same tree. But the last man, a local, stayed in the bar longer than Colonel expected. Finally, watching him inside the brightly lit bar from where he stood in the darkness, Colonel’s anger got the best of him. He needed to finish this before people saw the three men. So he took his bayonet from his pocket and held it tightly behind his back. He went into the bar and sat next to the fellow.
“Did you happen to run into a young woman today who has some tribal marks here and is quite beautiful?” he asked, touching both sides of his cheeks to indicate where the marks were on Salimatu.
“So what if I did? I run into girls and women all the time. Are you the police, small boy?” The man rose up from his chair and stood over Colonel.
“She is my sister, and I am better than the police.” Colonel pressed the bayonet against the man’s side, not wounding him but letting him know he would, and he asked the man to walk outside. The man thought about refusing, but he changed his mind as he felt the knife about to enter his flesh.