The Seeds of Revolution

A partial review of How Beautiful We Were.

I’m currently 200 pages into How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue, a heart-wrenching story about a fictional village named Kosawa being poisoned by an oil company called Pexton. It is the story of their suffering and their resistance, sparked by the actions of the town’s “madman,” Konga, who refuses to continue following the status quo. Kosawa has been the target of Pexton for decades due to its oil-rich soil, and its people are paying the price. Poisoned well water, a neon green river covered in toxic waste. Regular oil spills that kill crops. Smoke so thick and black the children can’t breathe. The children die. Slowly and from unnameable illnesses. But the company’s representatives continue to visit every two months, placating them with promises to look into things while being expedient about continuing to ravage their lands. 

Resource extraction is nothing new. It's how the West makes its money, taking things from places that have it until they no longer do and leaving the people who stewarded that land to beg for things they once had in abundance. Things that they took care of. This came into sharp relief for me when I visited the Gold Coast in Ghana over the Christmas break, named for the way gold used to flow in abundance in its rivers (in Anansi's Gold, Yeebo writes of a village that had a river in the center where gold would wash up). It also traded in people¹. One of the Gold Coast's main attractions is its various "slave castles," which were the final stop of an enslaved person's journey before embarking on the Middle Passage. While there, the guide led us into dungeons, rooms where the air was thin and dank. We were told about the suffering of our ancestors and how they were beaten, punished, tortured, and broken. We were told of what they did to the brave. How some were singled out and taught to speak English or Dutch or Spanish to report back on the conversations of the enslaved. How they were perched outside of the one window that brought in light or air, their one comfort, a falsehood, a tool for control. The ways the captors believed themselves to be good². That castle took over a hundred years to build. Before that, it was just cages on the beach. But the Cape Coast castle was designed to be permanent, the kind of building that one man could die working on only for his son to pick up his tools and continue. It's the site of generational suffering. Around the castle, children begged for money, accosting us, smiling and making motions at their mouths, signaling food. They watch us. When they can't see me—in the cover of my air-conditioned bus, windows darkened, I watch them. I watch them play with each other and laugh and joke and pocket money, only for them to chase after one person or another moments later. They're children. They're the same as my five-year-old sister—silly, mischievous, clever, funny, kind. I imagine they compare their takes later when they've navigated the narrow streets and gone back to places I'll never be able to see from my window. These are children born in a place where their resources have been extracted—carefully, systemically, over centuries, until it became unfeasible or illegal, and those captors moved on to the next thing. Left with crumbling edifices built by people who once saw a land so abundant that they believed their luck would never run out. 

How Beautiful We Were is the story of people undergoing a similar situation—land theft and resource extraction—but in the 80s rather than the 1800s. Despite being grounded in humanity, Mbolo’s writing is a clarion call for revolution. She utilizes Konga, the madman, as a symbol of audacity, of someone willing to do the previously unthinkable, the things no one else would dare to try. He decides to hide the keys of the Pexton men sent to tell them of their continued misfortune (native informants!), effectively trapping them in the place they’ve subjugated. This moment, which takes place in the book’s opening pages, was a powerful one for me because it speaks to the depersonalization of state violence and how the people who make these decisions very rarely have to live with their effects. His actions profoundly affect the village’s children, who are most affected by the oil spills. Mbue employs the first person plural to drive this home, speaking for the children as a whole. It emphasizes the communal nature of the village and how joy and pain are experienced collectively. About 100 pages later, Mbolo brings Konga back to impart the values of self-guided revolution to the village’s envoys, who are planning to go to the capital, Bézam, to speak to government officials about their continued suffering. A place that had proven dangerous once before. On page 102, he says, “We are the only ones who can free ourselves…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.” Reading this, I immediately thought of Audre Lorde and her declaration that the master’s tool won’t dismantle the master’s house and will only allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game. As it turns out, Konga is right. I don’t have to tell you that the village’s ultimate punishment didn’t fit the crime. 

As people of the West, the question of whether oppressed people should be allowed to resist is (at some tables, not mine) considered an impolite dinner conversation. We struggle with the idea of freedom from subjugation (especially when that resistance is violent) because we have been spoon-fed ideas about world peace while witnessing something different. Moreover, empires have never been peaceful because the state only seeks control, and control requires violence. These are questions posed in private and public, and despite what anyone says, our stance on this matters very little because the state acts on our behalf—giving us creature comforts and distractions and a whole heap of our own problems to shut us up. Violence is always bad, the state will say, unless it is necessary, which in the eyes of the state is always. Because the people being taken from are often promised things that are never coming. It is only when their herds are thinned, and they bury their children, and they pray to a God that seems silent but is still worth believing in (because miracles happen somewhere every day and hasn’t God shown up in one way or another before the moment you recognize you are doomed?) that we can admit something happened to them in the first place. False hope is, in its way, a violence. And it is often the violence that predates the stuff you see in Pulitzer-prize-winning photo essays: people fleeing their homes, the dead wrapped tight, the lone shoe of a likely-dead child, dirty water dripping from a tap in Flint, Michigan. All things that the state will tell you are inevitable because, in one way or another, the oppressed got in the way or they were worth less than the land they lived on.

Despite this harsh reality, art presents alternatives. There’s a deep sense of justice in Mbue’s work and very clear ideas about who deserves it and why. She expertly plants the seeds of Thula’s journey to becoming a revolutionary (not a spoiler, they tell us this in the book’s description!) a hero’s journey you’re rooting for and believing in. I don't know how she gets there from where I’m at in the book now, but I do know that reading is part of it. Thula is a bibliophile and carries around three books—Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Wretched of the Earth, and The Communist Manifesto. Mbue is not subtle. These works, seminal texts in radical Black thought, offer a guidebook within a novel for contextualizing the experience of the oppressed while offering a map for how they’ll get there. If Konga is both a madman and prophet, I assume it’s by freeing themselves.

How good is this book cover

The interplay of revolutionary text and narrative action reminded me of the movie High Flying Bird (2019), directed by Steven Soderbergh (famous for the Oceans movies, Erin Brockovich and Magic Mike of all things) and written by Tarell Alvin McCraney, who famously wrote Moonlight. It's the story of an agent and his NBA rookie client and takes place over the course of a tense 72-hours during the end of the 2011 NBA lockout. It opens with Ray (the agent), played by André Holland, meeting his client Erick Scott (the rookie), played by Melvin Gregg, at the Boom Boom Room for breakfast. Over coffee, they agree: this lockout is bad for business. During that conversation, Ray gifts Erick an envelope and calls it "a bible" (not the Bible, a bible, he says), instructing Erick to open it "at the right time." Ray, a man with a plan, decides to take action to grab the league's attention, organizing a pickup game between two basketball giants in the South Bronx in a gym and posting it on social media. It immediately goes viral, and the wheels begin turning for a player-owned league, where the talent bands together and controls all the money made off their image. It's no secret that sports are often looked at as modern-day plantations, where wealthy white men oversee their Black talent, making an eye-watering amount of money from Black bodies running up and down a court or a field. The pickup game is an inversion of the norm, an act of resistance, and the player's recognition of their collective power spooks the owners. It isn't long before they scramble to make a deal, reinstating the league. At the film's close, it seems like everything is resolved, but no one is the same. They've seen what is possible.

A still from High Flying Bird

Just before the credits roll, Erick finally opens that package (spoilers ahead). The bible is The Revolt of the Black Athlete, which outlines how athletes like Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar revolted. They were vilified long before they were iconized, and this book contextualizes their resistance and also offers context for the explicit link between slavery and the modern-day sports-industrial complex. I remember seeing that moment and catching my breath, stunned. It reframed the movie entirely. I now viewed the games as a protest rooted in lineage, criticism, and history rather than the schemes of a clever man. Revolution wasn't the byproduct, it was the point. By creating the possibility of an alternate universe and bending the world they knew, Ray freed Erick, giving him the tools to understand just how that freedom came to be. And now, with that knowledge, Erick could choose to free somebody else.  

Another great cover

The movie (and, so far, the book) speaks to the pragmatism of oppressed people and the sophistication of resistance. The oppressed are often presented as unintelligent, incapable of self-governance, or violent (anything but human). Still, the novel and High Flying Bird show that this characterization couldn’t be further from the truth. Both outline pathways to freedom, even if that freedom is fleeting. It’s in a pickup game, in the kidnapping of government officials, in refusing to cower and bend. It’s in the heart and in the mind. Or maybe, in a book.

1. Google wanted to change this to with people, because trading in people is grammatically incorrect but it’s true. They traded in people. People as currency. As commodity. Humans cannot be bought and sold, and so to make that possible those people must no longer be people. They traded in slaves, for example, is considered grammatically sound.

2. Our tour guide mentioned that Tony Blair had visited the castle a few years back and made a big show of visiting a place that had made his country's wealth. One of many, the British Empire was vast and total in its goals of resource extraction and destruction. After the visit concluded, where he likely made a good show of playing the admonished colonizer, someone asked the big question. Reparations? That someone said. His reply? Slavery had been legal when the British were plundering West Africa. Our group laughed incredulously. The people doing the enslaving also making the laws make it all very tricky. Very convenient. He left that day and eventually flew back to his country, leaving the children there, fated to live in a homeland that will never know a potential uninterrupted by colonialism. I cried that day—for what happened and what could've been.