Free A Dancer In the Dust by Thomas H. Cook

Martine, save that Seso had, in coming here, felt himself no less doomed than she had been.
    I had only the memory of a particular night to argue that Seso had always considered himself something of a marked man. “I am an outcast,” he’d said on that occasion. He’d said this grimly, his words weighted with fatality, and he’d never seemed more a boy of the bush than at that moment, a boy who’d seen just how a pack of hyenas surround their isolated prey, their cackling and their cries, the nipping at the flanks of their exhausted victim. There is nothing kind in nature, as anyone who lives at its mercy knows, and Seso had certainly lived that unforgiving life. Even so, I’d come to believe that as he’d lived alongside me, he’d become more trusting not only of me but, dare I say it, of his fellow man, perhaps even his institutions. More’s the pity that he’d abruptly found that trust both unwarranted and dangerous.
    I’d been in Tumasi for only a couple of weeks when it happened, and on that particular day I’d been driving about the savanna in an attempt to come up with a helpful project. While I was gone, an official from the Agricultural Ministry who’d stopped in the village had returned to his car to find his binoculars missing. He’d seen Seso loitering about his car and had immediately accused him. Seso had stood silently and with great dignity as the official hurled insults at him. “You are an outcast,” he’d yelled, “a thief like the rest of your kind.” At that point the official had more or less arrested Seso, then taken him to Nulamba, where the National Police had an office.
    It was Fareem who’d told me all this when I got back to Tumasi late that same afternoon. He’d been in the village when Seso was accused and had waited there until my return so that he could tell me what had happened. He agreed to go with me to Nulamba, where we’d found Seso locked in a back room of the small, tin-roofed building that served as headquarters for the district police. In a room that doubled as a storage closet, Seso sat on the floor in a humble, squatting posture, surrounded by a bramble of brooms and mops and plastic buckets. He seemed utterly reduced and humiliated, like one whose best efforts had come to nothing.
    “They are accusing me,” he said as he lifted himself from the floor, “but I did nothing. I work hard. I am not a thief.”
    It was the cry of a young man who’d done everything he could to better himself. To be locked up like a common criminal in this sorry backroom depository of plastic jerry cans and buckets seemed almost more than he could bear. “I am not a thief,” he repeated brokenly. “I do not steal.”
    It was seeing noble, hardworking Seso in such a condition that had emboldened me at that moment, so that I’d marched back into the constable’s office and demanded his release.
    “I am sorry, but he must be questioned,” the constable said.
    He wore no badge on his plain, olive green uniform, so there was nothing to suggest his authority save the decidedly innocuous sunflower pin on his cap, one that would be replaced by crossed pangas a few years later. This shaved-down form of official dress had also been part of President Dasai’s ideology of Village Harmony. In Lubanda, even the attire of authority was to be soft, pliable, unthreatening. That the constable currently wearing it would shift his allegiance to Mafumi when the time was right, get a much-sought-after promotion, and later help to carry out the Janetta Massacre, would never have occurred to Lubanda’s soon-to-be-filleted chief of state.
    But the constable’s capacity for violence was plenty clear to me. I could almost see the shadow of jackboots creep over his saintly sandals. He started to get up, then thought better of it, and eased back into his chair, where he rested like a big cat in the corner of his cage. “This prisoner has been accused of stealing, Mr. Campbell,” he explained.