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Nnedi Okorafor has described the arc of her Binti trilogy as: “African girl leaves home. African girl returns home. African girl becomes home." Which is to say, that this is not a narrative in which the important things are what Binti does, but rather, who Binti is, and who she becomes.
By the time we as readers embark on the final volume of the trilogy, Binti: The Night Masquerade, Binti has already become much more than she was in the beginning. She starts out her journey as an African girl, of the Himba people, a marginalised group within the area she grows up in, which is dominated by the more numerous and far more aggressive Khoush. She is a harmonizer, someone who can sense and use the currents of energy in its very broadest sense - emotional, physical, cultural - to bring things into harmony with eachother, a peacemaker. But she longs to be more.
She travels to an ancient, galactic university, surviving a massacre of her shipmates by the non-human enemies of the Khoush and entering into an exchange of genetic material with her attackers in order to bring about a measure of truce. She becomes friends, perhaps even more than friends, with Okwe, one of the Meduse who attacked her ship, and in the second volume, when she returns to Earth and Himbaland, Okwe accompanies her. At home, she discovers that she has grown beyond the limitations placed on her by the traditions of her people, and learns that through her father, she has a heritage communion made many generations ago between sone of her people, not treated as outcastes, and an alien race, the Zinariya. And yet again, Binti becomes more, as she chooses to join the outcaste community, having her alien DNA activated. Bonding with Okwe gave her the ability to communicate at a distance with the Meduse; becoming Enyi Zinariya opens her to a gene-based technology that permits long-distance communication with all others of her kind, and access to a racial history.
But at the opening of the third novella, Binti is in dire circumstances. Still struggling to adapt to the changes in her ways of thinking, perceiving and communicating brought about by the activation of her Zinariya self, she learns that the Khoush have attacked her parent’s home, seeking to kill both her and Okwe. Having failed to find either, they have set fire to her family’s house, and all her relatives, who sought safety in the deep roots of the ancestral structure formed from a massive tree, are believed dead. And Meduse ships, summoned by Okwe, are en route to avenge the attack and open up a new chapter of the long Meduse-Khoush war, on a battleground of the lands of the Himba people.
Despite her deep personal loss, despite being rejected by the other Himba for what and who she has become, Binti tries to use her skills as a master harmonizer to bring about peace between Meduse and Khoush.
And here is where it is vital to remember that this is a story about who Binti is becoming, not a story about what Binti does. Because despite her efforts, she is betrayed, and the peace fails. And everything that follows after is about what Binti will become, and not what happens to the Himba, the Khoush or the Meduse.
And part of Binti’s becoming is learning to be her own judge and arbiter, not to accept without question the beliefs if others, which her own experiences have shown her are so often limited and blind. In becoming her own home, Binti becomes mistress of herself, unbound by the restrictions others have always placed on her, freed by the web of connections she has forged with others to be fully herself among them.
By the time we as readers embark on the final volume of the trilogy, Binti: The Night Masquerade, Binti has already become much more than she was in the beginning. She starts out her journey as an African girl, of the Himba people, a marginalised group within the area she grows up in, which is dominated by the more numerous and far more aggressive Khoush. She is a harmonizer, someone who can sense and use the currents of energy in its very broadest sense - emotional, physical, cultural - to bring things into harmony with eachother, a peacemaker. But she longs to be more.
She travels to an ancient, galactic university, surviving a massacre of her shipmates by the non-human enemies of the Khoush and entering into an exchange of genetic material with her attackers in order to bring about a measure of truce. She becomes friends, perhaps even more than friends, with Okwe, one of the Meduse who attacked her ship, and in the second volume, when she returns to Earth and Himbaland, Okwe accompanies her. At home, she discovers that she has grown beyond the limitations placed on her by the traditions of her people, and learns that through her father, she has a heritage communion made many generations ago between sone of her people, not treated as outcastes, and an alien race, the Zinariya. And yet again, Binti becomes more, as she chooses to join the outcaste community, having her alien DNA activated. Bonding with Okwe gave her the ability to communicate at a distance with the Meduse; becoming Enyi Zinariya opens her to a gene-based technology that permits long-distance communication with all others of her kind, and access to a racial history.
But at the opening of the third novella, Binti is in dire circumstances. Still struggling to adapt to the changes in her ways of thinking, perceiving and communicating brought about by the activation of her Zinariya self, she learns that the Khoush have attacked her parent’s home, seeking to kill both her and Okwe. Having failed to find either, they have set fire to her family’s house, and all her relatives, who sought safety in the deep roots of the ancestral structure formed from a massive tree, are believed dead. And Meduse ships, summoned by Okwe, are en route to avenge the attack and open up a new chapter of the long Meduse-Khoush war, on a battleground of the lands of the Himba people.
Despite her deep personal loss, despite being rejected by the other Himba for what and who she has become, Binti tries to use her skills as a master harmonizer to bring about peace between Meduse and Khoush.
And here is where it is vital to remember that this is a story about who Binti is becoming, not a story about what Binti does. Because despite her efforts, she is betrayed, and the peace fails. And everything that follows after is about what Binti will become, and not what happens to the Himba, the Khoush or the Meduse.
And part of Binti’s becoming is learning to be her own judge and arbiter, not to accept without question the beliefs if others, which her own experiences have shown her are so often limited and blind. In becoming her own home, Binti becomes mistress of herself, unbound by the restrictions others have always placed on her, freed by the web of connections she has forged with others to be fully herself among them.