The Trust

British Togoland was administered under United Nations trusteeship, which gave its inhabitants a right their neighbours did not have: an international body was obliged to receive what they sent it. The right was used, in very large numbers. Kodzo Fiadzo is thirty four, a schoolmaster, and he waits six years before he uses it. When he does, it is not about the great political question of the day. It is about farmland. A boundary drawn by two European powers cuts the village lands in half, and a man from the next town has been turned back from his own yam field and told to obtain a document. He writes in Ewe, because it is the only language in which he knows exactly what he has said. In Ewe the operative clause states a right that has not stopped, and asks, in a single construction, that the petitioners be heard and the land returned. In English it becomes a request to be heard about lands formerly held. They are heard. A visiting mission sits four hours in the heat and reports accurately. A plebiscite is held in which fifty eight per cent vote to integrate and his own district votes the other way. The trusteeship ends, the door closes, and nothing replaces it. He writes for thirty seven years and every reply he receives is courteous, accurate and correct, and he dies holding that a thing which has never been answered is not finished. In 2026 Adzo Fiadzo is engaged for a boundary reaffirmation on the same frontier. Her job is to stand in village squares and say in Ewe what officials say in English. There is no villain in this book. The translator was exceptional at his work, found the hardest sentence in the document, named the problem in four pencilled words, and was moved onto court records before he could come back to it.