How Beautiful We Were

Yaya, Thula’s grandmother, is empathetic and independently minded, having decided to marry Big Papa despite everyone else’s criticisms of his mental health challenges. She accepts his mood swings despite not knowing how he became the way that he was. Yaya has the ability to see what people need to be happy and encourages them to obtain it, such as education for Thula or a husband for Sahel. By the end of her life, Yaya is so ready to die and so overcome with grief that she has reached a place of jaded and cynical peace, seeing the things that once mattered to her as silly and dismissing the idea that Kosawa could ever experience meaningful change. After losing her husband and sons and seeing the cycles of violence and degradation that ravage her country and village, Yaya releases her attachment to tradition and to Kosawa, believing that it is time to stop fighting for the land.

Thula’s uncle Bongo is a politicized and educated member of the community in Kosawa, always on the frontline of the revolution and reading books like The Communist Manifesto. Others see him as a selfless and powerful man. After Woja Beki is deposed, Bongo is chosen as the new village leader. His ability to speak English makes him especially useful in the village’s attempts to reach out to the world beyond their country to make their story heard. Bongo struggled to find his place when his admired older brother Malabo was alive; after his death, Bongo tries to act how Malabo would. He makes it his mission to save Kosawa so that Malabo’s children will at least be able to live.

Sahel, Thula’s mother, is a static character whose life is largely shaped by grief and traditional gender roles. Sahel is the one left behind to take care of the young and the old members of the family after her husband takes a risk in the name of justice and is killed. She is an understanding caregiver, listening to what her children want and need even when she doesn’t agree with them. However, Sahel is also an independent thinker who breaks cultural expectations: She marries Malabo even though others advise against it, is the first person to allow her child to go to school in Lokunja, and flirts with the Cute One because she misses sex and intimacy. Although she puts immense pressure on herself as a caregiver, she eventually rejects the taboo against widows remarrying to find a second husband.

Woja Beki, the town leader, is hated by other characters because of how quickly he became complicit in Kosawa’s subjugation; he is on the Pexton payroll, so the decisions he makes are influenced more by his need to hold on to his position than what is best for the village. His character symbolizes the larger themes of power and corruption, showing that despite the value of collectivism the village claims to espouse, no one ever chooses to let go of their individual privileges and position of power. Despite Woja Beki’s loyalty towards Pexton and his desire to keep the Sick One alive, he still ends up being executed by the very people he aimed to please.

The village regards Konga as taboo and an outcast because of his mental illness. The villagers believe that he has been possessed by an evil spirit in atonement for an ancestor’s sin, and Kosawa tradition says that touching someone who has been possessed will lead to death. However, he is not completely isolated: Konga is supported by the community, as mothers take turns cooking him meals and his illness makes him exempt from village duties. Konga is the impetus for Kosawa’s rebellion against Pexton, which gives him a mystical and sage-like quality. Although his decision to steal the Leader’s keys is seen as extreme, he defends his decision lucidly; it is evident that villagers find it appropriate that someone they view as an outsider should start their revolution.

Every other chapter is narrated by a first-person plural narrator identified as “the children”—most often, Thula and the seven classmates that attended school with her in Lokunja, although sometimes the voice also includes Thula’s other peers. None of these characters are named besides Thula, and they rarely have individual character traits or life events. The seven classmates dwindle to five men who act both as Thula’s sidekicks, often looking up to her ideas, and as anti-heroes, doing things that other characters disagree with in the name of what they consider justice. Their actions eventually devolve into violence and mayhem; their abduction of the Fish family leads directly to the village’s destruction at the hands of the government.

Thula’s father Malabo has already been disappeared by the government when the novel starts but is often referenced by other characters. He was a leader while alive and is a mentor from the grave; Malabo’s younger brother Bongo often speaks about attempting to do what Malabo would have done in a given situation. Thula inherits her father’s ambition to see justice for Kosawa; like her, Malabo was unable to live with the exploitative practices of Pexton and valued restoring the village’s ruined environment over everything else.

Pexton is the fictional American oil company that works alongside the corrupt government in Kosawa’s country. Although Kosawa sees Pexton as their main enemy, characters also often acknowledge that the dictatorial government is just as much at fault for what is happening. Pexton is untrustworthy and deceitful: Their practices exclude Kosawa’s residents from getting jobs with the company, their disregard for the environment poisons the village’s water supply and kills children, and their land lease agreement is clearly made permanent through government bribes. The company often pretends to listen to the villagers’ concerns, while doing nothing to rectify the situation.

The Leader, the Sick One, and the Round One are Pexton representatives who symbolize the self-serving approach of the company to Kosawa: “They’d come for Pexton, to keep its conscience clean; they hadn’t come for us” (5). Once taken hostage, the aptly nicknamed Sick One, Kumbum, becomes deathly ill and is humanized by his pleas for life.

Kumbum’s nephew Austin, the son of an African mother and an American missionary, is Thula’s love interest and an ideological bridge between two worlds. Thula describes him as “a man from somewhere and elsewhere but sadly from nowhere” (272). Austin is a journalist in Bezam and is the first outsider to take Kosawa’s plight seriously; in his professional and spiritual life, he grapples with the fact that his profession means focusing on elsewhere. Unlike Thula, Austin’s commitment to justice is not boundless. As the novel continues, he becomes less and less involved in her revolutionary movement, unwilling to experience the pain of failure endlessly. By the end of the book, he has become a monk, fully removing himself from his previous life as an instigator of change.

The life of Thula’s brother Juba is shaped by deep trauma: his near-death experience, his overwhelming grief at his father going missing, his friends’ deaths, and having lived through a massacre. In response, Juba rejects Thula’s fight for justice: Whereas Thula is continually hopeful and driven about revolution, Juba looks for a way to live a freer, more joyful life. Separating from Thula’s ambitions, Juba prioritizes his relationship and child; he also puts aside his father’s strict moral standards to become a wealthy government official. Prior to joining the government, Juba hypothesized that filling the government with people who had faced subjugation would lead to less corrupt governance, but he disproves this theory himself—he has no power to fight the system from within, and instead simply grows hedonistic and power hungry. His character demonstrates how difficult it is for people not to perpetuate inequities when given power and privilege.

Big Papa, Thula’s grandfather, was misunderstood as an angry, nihilistic man. In actuality, he was a man whose childhood trauma plagued him: Big Papa was a survivor of child sexual abuse, whose family prevented him from speaking about what had happened to him. In response, Big Papa became a realist who saw through lies and was unable to be silent about the injustice he saw as an adult. His cynicism about the world was continually proven right. This inability to ignore injustice is a thread that connects the generations of the Nangi family, as Big Papa, Malabo, and Thula feel the same drive to affect change rather than sitting by.

These sets of twins are symbols of Kosawa’s traditional belief system. Revered, shrouded in mystery, and bearers of cultural knowledge, they are seen as a conduit between the Spirit and the human world and are not expected to abide by the same norms as everyone else, such as marriage. Jakani and Sakani’s healing power and memory-wiping abilities allow Kosawa to fight against Pexton when Thula is a child. These twins are also martyrs, deciding not to heal the Sick One even though it will make Kosawa’s life more difficult and throwing the first spear during the massacre. The first set of twins is later reincarnated as Bamako and Cotonou—brothers whose powers seem distinctly less positive than their spiritual forebears. The second set of twins decides to sexually assault and forcibly impregnate Thula; since villagers see marriage and reproduction as markers of a woman’s worth, the twins want to shore up Thula’s support as a revolutionary leader by aligning her body with their society’s gender expectations.

Mr. Fish, who arrives in Kosawa as the new overseer, is a flat character symbolic of Pexton’s empty promises. Most of Kosawa is hopeful about Mr. Fish because he is more involved with the village’s fight and pays lip service to justice. However, Thula’s friends, see that Mr. Fish has the intention to keep extracting more resources despite his kind and engaged exterior; their eventual decision to kidnap him and his family and hold them hostage results directly in the destruction of the village.

His Excellency is the unnamed dictator of the unnamed African country where the novel is set. He is the ultimate antagonist, whose deplorable corruption and self-dealing is seen as worse than Pexton’s exploitative practices by the people of Kosawa. He is described as a merciless leader who trusts no one, and though he is revered in public, privately everyone wants him dead. His Excellency is backed by European and American government leaders, whose decisions are influenced by powerful resource-extraction companies such as Pexton. Even when Pexton tries to make superficial changes to its practices in Kosawa, His Excellency does not agree. Eventually, His Excellency orders the village to be burned to the ground.