Who Fears Death

“Papa was dearly loved, despite the fact that he’d married my mother, a woman with a daughter like me—an Ewu daughter. That had long been excused as one of those mistakes even the greatest man can make.”

It’s a demonstration of how deep the prejudice runs that the townspeople do not view this as evidence that their own bigotry is the problem. They consider Fadil to be a great man dearly loved by everyone, so one might think that if he does not hold this prejudice that it is the prejudiced who are wrong. This does not seem to occur to them.

“The Nuru men, and their women, had done what they did [raped the Okeke women] for more than torture and shame. They wanted to create Ewu children. Such children are not children of the forbidden love between a Nuru and an Okeke, nor are they Noahs, Okekes born without color. The Ewu are children of violence. […] These Nuru had planted poison. An Okeke woman who gave birth to an Ewu child was bound to the Nuru through her child. The Nuru sought to destroy Okeke families at the very root.”

Okorafor has stated that the genesis of this novel was a newspaper article about the real life use of “weaponized rape” by Arab militiamen against Black African women in the Darfur Conflict in the early 2000s. The purpose of the practice was similar to the novel—to bring shame upon the women and weaken the bloodline. In the novel, the practice appears to stem from Daib’s control over the Nuru people; through his campaigns, which include weaponized rape, he uses the Nuru in order to attempt to eradicate the Okeke, and it is suggested that when Onye breaks the men of Daib’s spell, they are appalled by what they have done. Regardless, it is important to note that these actions—as well as many of the core conflicts of the novel—are very much rooted in practices and conflicts that exist in our own world (and we learn at the end that the Seven Rivers Kingdom is meant to be a future version of Darfur).