Two days after the final sound of gunfire had been consigned to the past, Ayo found the mirror. It had been concealed under the cinders of the Kamanga council hall, where its ragged edge now took the sun as a warning flash. It was not whole, the shattered triangle of what had once held truth tainted by soot and time.
He cupped it in his rough palms. For a moment, the face that glared up at him was alien. The eyes were heavy, sunken. His hair was grey-streaked, though he was only twenty-seven. But here he was Ayo Mwakimako, once a schoolteacher, now a witness to the death of dreams.
As he rose, the mirror shook. He put it in the little side pocket of his old cashmere coat. He would keep it. Not for vanity, but for remembrance.
Kamanga was a silent village that perched on the cusp of the Zambezi valley, where the winds spoke softly and the baobabs stored stories that survived generations. Ayo had come back after university to teach, turning down a position in the capital.
“Memory is fresh where change begins,” he had told colleagues.
He taught history and civics to children who reeked of wood smoke and river clay. His chalk sketched territorial maps of pre-colonial kingdoms, treaties and fragile threads that bound their nation into one. He instructed them about unity, about the dream of prosperity after independence that their parents had longingly relayed to them.
His younger brother, Sefu, was not so easily persuaded.
“Dreams you teach, Ayo,” Sefu had said one twilight, sharpening up a hunting knife. "But we live in nightmares."
The rift had begun years before — tribal whisperings, murmured jokes that stung, resource inequality between regions. Politicians fanned these flames. The soldiers marched in and the president fell and they said they had come to right wrongs.
But the correction sucked the land dry. Kamanga was burned down by the Third Brigade on 17 August, Year of the Second Liberation. That’s what the new military council named it. The president had been killed in real time on the radio. His family vanished. Opposition leaders were chained up and charged with sedition. The soldiers did not arrive as liberators but as judges.
Loyalty was put to the test of villages. Those who came up short — Kamanga among them — were abolished.
Ayo had tried to stop them. He implored Captain Itaru Muta, his former student, who was adjusting to a uniform two sizes too large for his conscience.
“Captain, we are unarmed. We only want peace.”
“Peace is for the weak,” Muta had replied, not looking him in the eye. “And weakness produces traitors.”
Subsequently, the survivors ascended to the high grounds. Ayo remained. Somebody had to cover the bones. He moved bodies into shallow graves — bodies he had taught, parties he had laughed at, a loved one. Mama Wema, who sent him groundnuts every Thursday. Old Bakari, the village griot, whose fables danced on the wind like drums. And Nia.
Nia. His former student. His secret hope. She had come back from the city, where she was in nursing school, to care for her sick mother. She died holding a first-aid kit, with a boy who had been shot shielded by her body. Ayo buried her by the old fig tree, so that she faced the sunrise. The sole thing unburnt was her locket. He tied it around his neck.
Sometimes he would sit on her grave and chat. He pictured her response — softy, patiently, always trumping him on grammar. He got up one evening and went up the hill to the old baobab. The tree had lived through droughts, floods and empires. Below it, his father had regaled him with tales of the fight for freedom. Below, he had kissed Nia for the first time, a boyish tremor.
The fragment of mirror still dwelt in his coat. He withdrew it and held it toward the sun, which was now low in the sky. The light reflecting on it created prisms of colours on the cracked ground. Within its luster, Ayo perceived Kamanga — not what it was, but what it might have been. Children running. Laughter. A rebuilt school. A council hall not dominated by guns, but by talk.
He blinked, and it was gone. But the vision remained. And with it, a decision. Ayo started clearing the rubble of the school. Alone at first. And then came back two highland women. They carried cassava stems and blankets. A youth with one arm would come and be, a straggled conscript. After that, a mother whose husband had been shot for hiding books.
They worked in silence, planting, sweeping, carrying water, taking care of the work to be done that day and the next and the next. Prayer and proverb remembered the dead. Soon, word spread. Ayo had set up a tiny radio station run with solar scraps. He read poems, old folk tales and names of the lost each night. He encouraged others to write letters. Replies came from scattered towns and woodlands. One day he was greeted by a convoy of aid workers. One was a nurse who had trained with Nia. She hugged Ayo and wept.
“She talked about you a lot,” she said. “She thought Kamanga would come back up.”
Two years passed. Kamanga changed. Mud huts became brick homes. The school reopened. Ayo was teaching again, but this time under mango trees, while builders completed the new classrooms. The baobab remained, a sentinel of memory. And then, one morning, a figure limped into the village. It was Sefu. He had escaped a rebel ambush, but his face was burned and his eyes sunken.
“I was wrong,” he said, getting down on his knees in front of Ayo. “All we built was ruin.”
Ayo helped him up. No lecture. No scorn.
“We rebuild,” he said. “That’s all we can do.”
Sefu stayed. He dug wells, fixed roofs, and never requested forgiveness — he worked for it, bit by bit. Five years to the day of the fire, Kamanga held the inaugural Reflections Forum and brought together survivors, educators, elders and even a number of ex-soldiers hoping to find redemption. They sat under the baobab, each telling a story. A woman shared the last words she heard from her son before he was captured by the militia. A boy recited a poem about blood and bread. Ayo spoke last. He raised the mirror shard, secured to a wooden frame.
“This mirror came from the rubble,” he said. “It showed me my broken face. But it also showed me hope. “You and I were broken, but not beyond repair.”
He passed it around. Everyone caught their fractured, real reflections. The next time it came back to him, he laid it at the base of the baobab.
“Let this be our monument: to war, but to what comes after.”
The night was drizzly over the land. The villagers danced. It was the first time in years that the beat of the drums resounded through Kamanga. Ayo stood beneath the old baobab tree with Sefu, as they both closely observed the young children nearby playing around the well.
“Do you believe this peace will last?” Sefu asked.
Ayo did not immediately respond.
“No peace is permanent. But memory makes us accountable. We have a chance as long as we remember.”
Sefu nodded. In the far distance, the sky glow wasn’t an orange fire, but a blood red sunrise. The kind that warms, not burns. Ayo patted the locket on his neck and then the mirror at the tree’s base.
“This is for you, Nia,” he whispered.
And he smiled for the first time in a long time.
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