The Settlement
In 1963, the government approved 1.4 million for the villages below the dam. Not one family received a penny. Every one of them was written down as paid.
Sixty-one years later, a district doctor in Adzokpe screens a school for bilharzia and counts a hundred and forty-eight infected children out of two hundred and eleven. Four kilometres away, in a township built for resettled families, the rate is nine in a hundred. The difference is running water, installed in 1965, and Dr. Elikem Sowah wants to know who decided that and why.
In Asikam, an accountant clearing his dead father's house opens a box of his grandfather's papers and knows within ten minutes that he is reading a forgery, because the columns are too tidy.
And in the National Records Centre, an archivist processing a routine request sees the name of her father's village on a list of the compensated, and telephones home that evening to ask a simple question.
"Papa, what did our family receive when the dam was built?"
"We received the water."
The men who took the money have been dead for decades. Their grandchildren run banks, sit in Parliament, and fund the scholarships that sent the village children to school. Nobody will threaten Elikem, or Kwesi, or Dzifa. They will simply be offered something they cannot refuse without becoming difficult, ungrateful people.
A novel about what a country writes down, what it declines to ask, and the difference between being robbed and being erased.
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