Who Fears Death

Aro, too, chastises Onye for telling her friends, then tells her that “now they’re part of it” (136); Onye asks what he means, but he defers, saying only that she’ll see. Aro also tells her that he knows what she and Mwita did; they briefly argue about it, but she promises that she and Mwita will both refrain. Aro warns her of the seriousness of this, explaining that there had been a woman once who was pregnant without her master’s knowledge, who wiped out an entire town while attempting a simple exercise.

They begin their work together with foundational questions. Onye asks first about Fadil’s previous wife, Njeri, whom Aro also refused to teach; Aro acknowledges that it was a mistake not to teach her minor juju, but that she would have failed initiation, and that she was wild and arrogant like Onye.

Onye next asks who the woman was whose body she inhabited during initiation, but Aro snaps at her to ask Sola, the man in black. Sola is much older than Aro; Aro explains that a person must pass through death to pass initiation, but that not all who pass through death pass initiation, that this is determined by something else. Further, neither he nor Sola know why Mwita ultimately didn’t pass.

Next, she asks Aro about his own story. Aro had been from Gadi, in the Seven Rivers Kingdom, where the storyteller had been from as well. He was the second youngest of eleven children in a fishing family. His grandfather was also a sorcerer; he began teaching him at ten, after seeing Aro turn into a water weasel, and Aro passed initiation at thirteen. Some time later, after watching his mother get beaten for laughing at a Nuru man, he changed himself into an eagle and flew away; he remained as an eagle for many years before changing back, at which point he was no longer a boy.

Onye has questions, particularly about Aro’s story, and complains that parts don’t make sense. However, he asks of her, “What makes you think that you should understand it all?” (140).

On a Rest Day, on the first day of the Rain Fest, Onye and Mwita relax with the rest of the townspeople. Her friends arrive in the afternoon with bottles of palm wine, and they all drink and talk well into the night. “See us here and remember it,” she tells the reader (142), because these are happy times, and soon they will all lose their innocence and the story will progress quickly.

Aro begins teaching Onye the Mystic Points, requiring her to learn by memory as the points must remain a secret to anyone who has not passed initiation. “Everything is based on balance,” he tells her, and sorcerers manipulate these points with their tools—it is not magic, per se (144). The four points are the Uwa Point, which represents the physical world and the body; the Mmuo Point, which is the wilderness, or the afterlife; the Alusi Point, which represents forces, deities, spirits, and non-Uwa beings; and the Okike Point, which represents the Creator, and cannot be touched.

Aro takes her out to his goats to teach her something that “will make [her] sick” (145). Aro leads a goat to Onye, then disappears into his hut; he returns with a large knife, and before Onye can stop him, he slits the goat’s throat. She starts to kneel by the goat, but Aro stops her from touching the goat before it has died; he mutters to himself as he waits about how he has never seen anyone “unlearned do that” (146).

Once it dies, he asks her if she remembers what she did to her father the day of his funeral, then tells her to do the same thing. She is hesitant, but when she touches the goat, she realizes she can feel its mmuo-a moving. Onye draws from the energy surrounding her, healing the goat’s neck. The goat rises and lays its head in her lap as thanks; however, she is too nauseated to notice, vomiting several times on the walk back to the hut. Aro tells her it will be better in the future, that as she grows accustomed to bringing things back to life, she won’t feel any physical effect at all.

When Mwita returns, he cares for her but asks no questions: “He knew from the day I started learning that there would be a part of me that he’d have no access to” (147).

For the next three and a half years, Onye’s life continues in this manner: “Knowledge, sacrifice, and headaches” (148). Her friends sometimes kept their distance in mild fear, while she and Mwita simultaneously grew closer and further apart, as she grew “into something he both marveled at and envied” (148).

During a lesson on visiting distant places, Onye travels to the West and sees gruesome scenes of violence: “ripped oozing flesh, bloody erect penises, sinew, intestines, fire, heaving chests, mewling bodies engaged in evil” (149). While walking in the market a short while later, among people going about their business ignorant of the violence, Onye overhears a group of women talking ill of her. She snaps and begins yelling at the women and everyone else around them; then she brings the entire market into the wilderness and shows them the day of her mother’s rape.

Onye is so transfixed by the screaming of men and women in the past that she doesn’t realize at first that the people in the market are also screaming and sobbing. Mwita grabs her, furious, and pulls her away. She argues that if she and Mwita must live with the pain of knowing, the rest of the Okeke in their village should know, too. He responds that she doesn’t know everything, and he pulls her away to tell her the rest of his story.

Soon after he escaped, he was captured by Okeke rebels and made to fight for them with another group of Okeke children. The rebels beat all the children into obeying, but they also raped the girls. He twice tried to kill himself with the guns they made him learn to use, and twice was beaten out of it. When they were taken to fight the Nuru, Mwita fell sick, so they threw him into a mass grave with the dead and buried him alive. Fortunately, his fever broke, and he was able to dig himself free. “Those are your innocent Okeke ‘victims,’” he tells Onye. “It’s not as simple as you think […] There is sickness on both sides” (153).

Mwita and Onye return to Aro’s hut; Onye calms herself by flying away for a while as a vulture while Mwita and Aro speak. When she returns, she tells them she is going west to fulfill the storyteller’s prophecy; Aro doesn’t argue, as he tells her he won’t be able to prevent the townspeople from going after her this time, “Plus your father is expecting you” (154). As Aro talks, she begins to feel the stones hitting her head again, and something clicks, and she realizes that the woman whose body she inhabited, who was stoned to death, was in fact her future self: the death she was forced to experience during initiation was her own. “What better way to remove one’s fear of death than to show it to him,” Aro asks by way of explanation (155).

Mwita tells her that he intends to travel west with her. She asks him about his own death; however, Mwita defers and tells her “one’s end is one’s end and that’s the end of it” (156).

Onye’s mother asks for no explanation; she heard what had happened at the market, so the news that Onye would be leaving doesn’t surprise her. Around four in the morning, her friends arrive. Luyu had witnessed the market, but Diti and Binta ask her to show them, too, which is easier for her to do the second time.

Binta demands to go west, too; at first, Onye says no, but they know that Binta’s father has begun molesting her again, so she needs to escape, regardless. Luyu and Diti follow by insisting to go. Luyu points out that Diti is betrothed to Fanasi, her childhood sweetheart, which she had kept from Onye. They later meet to talk to Fanasi, and Onye once again shows him the carnage; angrily, he agrees to come with them, as well.

Because the townspeople knew they would be leaving town soon, they left Onye alone. Onye insists on traveling by foot: “I don’t ride camels. When my mother and I were living in the desert I knew wild camels. They were noble creatures whose strength I’d refused to exploit” (160).

Aro informs Onye that Sola wishes to speak with her, so the three of them meet and talk. Sola reminds her that she knows how her journey will end, and she knows that those who go with her may die along the way.

Sola asks what she knows of the prophecy and the Seer who foretold it. He tells her that the Seer, Rana, “was told something and couldn’t accept it. His stupidity will give you a chance, I think” (161). Because of his prejudices, he refused to believe that a Nuru man would be the one to end things; in fact, it was foretold that an Ewu woman would come, and Sola suggests strongly that it is Onye.