Since the beginning of the 21st century, African authors from across the continent, have been sweeping up literature’s most prestigious prizes. South Africa’s Damon Galgut is a Booker Prize winner for “The Promise,” and Noble Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, author of “Paradise,” – an examination of emigrant Zanzibar life – makes the point beyond any doubt. There’s also Ngozi Adichie “Purple Hibiscus,” set in the military era in Nigeria, and how it affected and changed the life of Nigerians. In 2007, she won the Orange Prize, now called Women’s Prize for Fiction, for her sensational book, “Half of a Yellow Sun,” about the Biafran civil war that almost divided the country. She also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for her “Americanah” book in 2014. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Maaza Mengiste received a 2020 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the author of “The Shadow King” and “Beneath the Lion’s Gaze,” which was named in 2010 as one of the best books of 2010 by the Christian Science Monitor.
The list goes on and on, but I want to focus on an African author who stands out in my mind: Imbolo Mbue. She published her first novel to acclaim in 2016, during the U.S. presidential campaign marked by racist alarms about immigration. “Behold the Dreamers” is a remarkable debut about immigrants from Cameroon living in New York City. Praised for the writer’s exquisite and exacting way with words, it was adapted into an opera, chosen for Oprah’s Book Club and translated into 11 languages. Informed by the Mbue’s own experience as an immigrant from Cameroon, the story depicted the hopes and frustrations of millions of people drawn to this country. Mbue’s enormous sympathy and fidelity to the voices of her characters – from the incredibly rich to the precariously poor – made the book one of the most enlightening and touching novels of the year and it won the PEN/Faulkner prize.
Mbue’s latest is “How Beautiful We Were,” and, once again, it asks readers to behold the dreamers. However, it’s an entirely different book from her first, accomplished out of a very different dream. Begun almost two decades ago, before she wrote “Dreamers,” this is the story of people touched by the United States from thousands of miles away. Though they put their trust in American decency, they’re not wanting to be allowed in but to be left alone.
This David and Goliath tale takes place in the 1980s in an imaginary village named Kosawa, in an unnamed African country. Knowing the real location isn’t necessary; the tragedy that explodes in the pages has been repeated in nations across the continent. We do learn that that it’s a sub-Saharan country suffering under the rule of a corrupt and violent dictator known as “His Excellency.” The villagers are struggling with the devastations of environmental pollution resulting from drilling by an American company called Pexton. A multinational corporation, it profits from the oil beneath the land without regard for the air and water, which has “progressed from dirty to deadly.” Pexton has caused the villagers to lose their ability to hunt and maintain their way of life and also made many grow sick from environmental toxins and die. In the country for years, the pollution danger was there early on: “When the sky began to pour acid and rivers began to turn green, we should have known our land would soon be dead,” the chorus recounts. Even the village leader, Woja Beki, is complicit. The villagers claim he has been “fattening his wives” thanks to corporate bribes.
The book opens at a village meeting with representatives from the oil company. Konga, a village madman, steals the car keys of the delegates, telling the stunned officials “Gentlemen, you’ll be spending the night with us in Kosawa.” That politely declared act of kidnapping sets off a series of violent acts and government reprisals that will tear through the village for decades.
The narrative moves between the perspectives of the children who witness this primary act of rebellion and other characters in the village. The act produces a retaliatory bloodbath against Kosawa and the arrest and execution of several villagers on charges of kidnapping. Readers are thrust into cycles of trauma, which are felt intensely by the Nangi family and, in particular, Thula. Barely 10 when we meet her, she grows into an intelligent, determined woman who has her heart set on helping Kosawa win its fight against Pexton. She’s a serious and studious girl whose father and several of his peers disappeared when they journeyed to the nation’s capital to lodge a complaint with the government about Pexton. She longs for her dad, but goes ahead with her education, overcoming tremendous obstacles to secure a high school education and college in the United States, where the political activism as well as justice-for-all system inspire her. Can she rest her hopes on American ideals to undo the damage done by its dependency on oil? When she learns that several other villagers are killed by the military during a protest in Kosawa, and her uncle is executed, Thula has one goal: “I promised myself after the massacre that I would acquire knowledge and turn it into a machete that would destroy all those who treat us like vermin.”
Thula returns to Kosawa a revolutionary, choosing the solitary path of teaching and activism in her native country. However, even before she returns, she toys with the idea of violence as a way of exerting pressure on Pexton. She inspires a group of her age to engage in acts of arson in order to plant some fears in the minds of Pexton managers. She throws all of her energy into creating a grassroots movement against His Excellency, who has allowed Pexton to drill wherever they want because he enjoys a life of wealth and privilege. Thula is able to hire a lawyer to sue Pexton in a U.S. court for reparations. Her brother, Juba, at first her ally, gradually distances himself from her, choosing instead the easy life, working for the government, and accepting corruption as part of the fabric of life in his country. The novel ends with the shattering of hopes for legal restitution and with yet another episode of violence and tragedy.
While this may seem bleak, what preserves a more positive sensibility in the novel is the care with which the Mbue depicts the bonds of African village life. The Nangi family is characterized by relationships of mutual care and nurture. The bonds between family members are lovingly portrayed and are in sharp contrast to the death and violence surrounding them. In any practical sense, the village that Thula and her friends are trying to save is already gone. From the first line, it’s obvious what awaits Kosawa. But the despair of this story is refuted by the beauty of Mbue’s prose and the clarity of her vision. “We hoped,” the children say, “that we would die where we were born.” As long as there are novels as powerful as “How Beautiful We Were,” the fight’s not over.
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