Nnedi Okorafor - Binti - The Complete Trilogy

As we left, heading further down the dirt road, I couldn’t shake the feeling that from all the sand brick homes and buildings that still stood (once we were a few minutes’ walk further from the Root, there was no further Khoush damage), people were watching us. They all must have known about the Okuruwo by this time, the news traveling rapidly by astrolabe and word of mouth as the palm leaf was passed from council member home to council member home. And if I knew my people as well as I knew I did, they were hopeful for my success even as they raged at me.

The stone building where the council regularly met was on the other side of Osemba, about a two-mile walk. We went around the lake and then set onto the main dirt road. Here, people stared from doorways, windows, and even came out of their homes to look at me, the “one who’d abandoned her people,” or Okwu, a “violent Meduse,” or Mwinyi, a “savage desert person.”

“Why let so many of those grow here?” Mwinyi asked as we passed a large group of trees with thick rubbery leaves and wide trunks covered in hard sharp thorns. He held up his hands and made several motions. A woman standing in the doorway of a large stone house we were passing gasped when she saw this, grabbed her staring toddler, pulled him inside, and slammed her door.

“The Undying trees?” I said, glancing at the closed door. Mwinyi didn’t pay the woman any mind. “We couldn’t dig them up even if we wanted to, their roots go too deep. Plus, because of them, we found drinkable underground water sources for Osemba; because of them, we can live here. We built our water systems around them.”

“I can see children accidentally impaling themselves on them while playing games in your street,” Mwinyi said. “Why are they called ‘undying’? Do spirits live in them?”

“Spirits live in everything,” Okwu said.

“Because they’re older than the Himba,” I said. “We respect them. When there are thunderstorms, it’s like they come to life. They vibrate. Fast enough to make a howling sound. You have to see it happen to know how incredible it is. And they make this salt that you can scrape from the leaves that’ll cure all kinds of sicknesses.”

Mwinyi was moving his hands fast now and when he finished by making a pushing motion forward, I saw the air before him warp for a moment. My head ached and I turned to look ahead of us until it stopped.

“Who are you talking to?” I asked.

“Your grandmother,” he said. “You know how she loves plants. These will blow her mind.” He paused. Then he chuckled. “She knows of them already.”

I smiled then I coughed, Okwu’s gasp billowing all around me. I heard footsteps scrambling away. When I looked back, I saw a group of children hiding behind the Undying trees, several of them giggling.

“They’re just curious,” I told Okwu in Meduse, hoping the low rumbly vibration of the language would scare the young girls off. It didn’t.

“One of them touched my okuoko, ” Okwu rumbled back. The children fled at the sound of its Meduse voice. “If they want death by stinger, I will give it to them.”

“Remember,” I said, switching back to Otjihimba. I smiled. “My otjize healed your okuoko . The little girl who touched you was covered with otjize . She can’t be bad for you.”

“Her otjize would burn my flesh,” Okwu rumbled in Meduse, irritably.

“If she touched you, then her otjize is on your okuoko, ” I said, laughing. “I smell nothing burning.”

“Your people are rude,” Mwinyi suddenly snapped. He was glaring at three men standing at the front of a building laughing. One of them pointed at Mwinyi and opened and closed his hand. “Crude, rude people.”

I grasped his arm and pulled him along. “I apologize on their behalf,” I said.

“Small-minded insular people,” he muttered. “I can speak their language, they can’t even greet me in mine.” Thankfully, he let me pull him along. I didn’t allow myself to think about what they must have been saying about me all this time. And now that there was Khoush-Meduse violence again that had led to the destruction of part of Osemba, and here I was bringing a Meduse to the town’s most sacred space, those sentiments would surely worsen. But in our walk across Osemba, though more kids and a few adults taunted Okwu and several spat and shouted at Mwinyi, not one person spoke to me.

The Osemba House was a giant smooth dome made of sandstone that sat on the eastern edge of town. The Root was on the westernmost edge, so the two buildings were as far from each other as one could get and still be in Osemba. The Osemba House was built between three Undying trees and inside was a stone platform built around the Sacred Well.

Daily, women from this side of Osemba came to collect water to drink, for the water here had a refreshing taste and settled upset stomachs in a way that the water pumped around town from the underground river did not. My mother would venture to this side of town once in a while and when she brought home the strange water, we’d all fight each other for our tiny cup of it that we’d sip after dinner. In the back, the outdoor meeting grounds faced the open desert.

“Let’s go around,” I said. “That’s where they’ll be.” I wasn’t sure how anyone would tolerate the three of us, tainted individuals by Himba standards, walking so close to the Sacred Well.

Okwu stopped for a moment and seemed to contemplate the building. When I turned to look at it, I laughed despite everything. “The Himba are a passive-aggressive people,” it said in Meduse.

I nodded. “We have ways of making our point strongly without saying a word.” It was only now, after being so close to a Meduse, that I gazed upon the Osemba House and realized it looked very much like a Meduse, the enemy of a people who treated the Himba like intelligent slaves. Everything is so complicated and connected, I thought. Everything. And nothing is coincidence, or so my mother used to always say. The space between my eyes stung. “Used to.” No longer. I walked faster.

Before I came around the side of the building, I heard the fire. The Sacred Fire was always burning, but only when an Okuruwo was called was it grown to this size. They all turned. They had all been waiting for us. Five old men, including Chief Kapika, two old women, including Titi—the woman who led the pilgrimage into the desert—and one young man.

I sighed, my eyes meeting the young man’s eyes. It was Dele, my best friend who’d stopped being my best friend when I snuck away to attend Oomza Uni. Who over the last year had decided to grow a beard and was tapped to become an apprentice to Chief Kapika. I had spoken to him just before the Enyi Zinariya came for me. He’d contacted my astrolabe. We’d spoken briefly and he’d looked at me with a pity so painful I’d been glad when the conversation was over. The last thing he’d said to me was, “I can’t help you, Binti.”

They all sat around the fire, the men wearing deep red kaftans and pants and the women wearing clothes similar to mine, a red wraparound skirt and a stiff red top. Both Titi and the other women had otjize rolled locks, braided into tessellating triangle patterns and extending down their backs. Dele’s head was shaven on both sides, the dense hair on top twisted into a thick braid that extended behind his head like a horn, stiff with a thin layer of otjize .

“Come,” Chief Kapika said.

Okwu’s voice came to me as if it were thrown. I don’t like fire, it said.

I approached the Himba Council. It won’t hurt you if you don’t get too close, I responded. Stay behind me. I glanced at Mwinyi and he gave me a brief nod. I led the way, Mwinyi behind me and Okwu behind him. I still wore my pilgrimage outfit that my mother had bought me. Fine, fine clothes for one of the finest moments in my life. But now the red skirt was caked with sand and my stiff top was dirty with my own sweat and old otjize . And my family was dead.