44 pages • 1 hour read
How Beautiful We Were
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Chapter 9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Children”
Content Warning: This section of the novel includes sexual assault and forced pregnancy.
Thula finds out about her friends’ violence against a laborer and stops sending them money. Mr. Fish, the new overseer in Kosawa, is well-liked, but the conditions of villagers’ lives do not change under his watch. When the perpetrators of the attack on the laborer cannot be found, three of the children are framed for the attack and imprisoned in Lokunja.
The Restoration Movement takes Pexton to court, and the company agrees to give Kosawa a percentage of the profit made on Pexton’s land and release the prisoners if the vandalism stops. The children agree, but Pexton does not abide by the terms of the agreement.
In the US, Thula and Austin fall in love, but he is unable to return to her home country. Austin is resigned to waiting for change, deciding that life is too short to battle immoveable forces. Thula, however, remains hopeful; she asks her friends to pause fighting until she can return and get the elders on board. She decides that the actual enemy is the dictatorial government, so she plans to rally her country against His Excellency. She wants to fight from a place of love.
Thula returns to Kosawa in 1998. Some of her friends are gone; another has stopped rebelling because his wife has given birth to Bamako and Cotonou, the reincarnations of the twins, and he must train them. Thula gets a government job as a teacher in Bezam, where she tries to mobilize students politically. She figures out that the Restoration Movement is running out of funds and cuts ties with the NGO; she also gives her friends money to buy guns for emergencies.
Thula has trouble gaining respect in her political movement because she is a single woman. Six years after her return, she’s made little progress. While Thula believes all of this work will pay off, her friends are not as hopeful. When one of the friends’ children dies, he shoots three laborers—a murder spree that sets off another round of violence: Village men kill 12 soldiers and government workers to avenge Kosawa’s deaths. In response, soldiers violently interrogate people in Kosawa, demanding they stop the killings.
Thula decides on a date for Liberation Day, ostensibly a celebration of the country. The twins forcibly abduct Thula for a secret ritual, in which she is sexually assaulted and impregnated with a villager’s semen. After this, people can tell something has shifted in Thula, and they start to respect her more. In November of 2005, everyone meets for Liberation Day at the school in Lokunja, celebrating with their friends and families. Thula starts a call-and-response and rallies the crowd, yelling about freedom.
Chapter 9 Analysis
Thula’s friends’ ideology diverges from hers: Her vision of Protest and Rebellion is still rooted in hope, while the other children are now simply desperate and power hungry. They rob, hurt, and kill laborers despite the fact that the laborers are other poor people from nearby villages, who have: “Pexton standing above them, barking at them to drill to the last drop or go home” (260). The friends relish having power over someone else—a pleasure that echoes the children’s perspective earlier in the book, when they called Kumbum the Sick One to feel a small amount of power over him. The thirst for power is unstoppable: When Thula eventually purchases guns for her friends to use in case of emergencies, the men are excited to use them: “We marveled at how good it felt to hold them. Killing suddenly seemed the most natural thing” (294). Violence is the only way the children feel they can affect their surroundings.
The novel’s exploration of the damaging effects of traditional beliefs and the juxtaposition between these cultural practices and modern values continues in these chapters. As Thula positions herself as a political leader, she tests the ability of her country to become less sexist. Her vision for the future comes from her seemingly endless well of hope, but this undying hope marks her as potentially taboo: Her peers wonders whether “something of Konga’s now lived within her” (303). Moreover, her unmarried status is deeply troubling in a society that still embraces its traditional beliefs; Thula has trouble gaining followers because the villagers believe there is something vaguely indecent about her—“nothing could make her respectable besides motherhood and marriage” (308). Ultimately, Kosawa is unable to change their belief that a woman is not worthy of respect if she has not had children—a belief that is so strong that it results in what some villagers see as well-meaning rape. The twins abduct and sexually assault Thula in an attempt to impregnate her, which they believe will make people see her as morally upright. To readers outside of this set of traditional beliefs, the rape is shocking, as is the idea that through this kind of violence a woman will gain the ability to fix the village’s problems. As Kosawa’s other women have been forced to carry the brunt of the revolution, Thula is forced to carry a baby to be the leader that Kosawa needs.
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