Who Fears Death

Who Fears Death, published in 2010 and written by Nnedi Okorafor, is a post-apocalyptic science fantasy novel set in a future version of Sudan. In this future, the light-skinned Nuru have enslaved the dark-skinned Okeke; the novel follows Onyesonwu (Onye), the daughter of an Okeke woman raped by a Nuru man. Onye soon discovers that her biological father is a powerful sorcerer, and that she, too, has inherited great magical powers from both her father and her mother. The novel follows Onye as she discovers her powers and sets off on a journey to defeat her father and rewrite the Great Book, thereby freeing the Okeke and ending the violence between the two tribes. Using the first person, Onye narrates the entire novel (except for the final few chapters), telling her story to an unseen narratee as she awaits future execution.

Plot Summary

Part 1 begins in medias res, at her adoptive father’s funeral. Onye, stricken with grief and still untrained as a sorcerer, places her hand on her father’s body and accidentally brings him back to life momentarily before she is stopped by a man named Aro. Onye then takes us back to her childhood; she was raised in the desert, alone with her mother, until she was six; they then settled in Jwahir, a town far to the east of the Seven Rivers Kingdom and therefore where Okeke live freely.