Who Fears Death

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010

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Part 3, Chapters 49-52Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 49 Summary

Ssaiku leaves for an important meeting after the incident; Mwita and Onye spend the evening in his tent. They fall asleep for hours; when they awaken, Luyu has brought them food, telling them that they must eat. Mwita and Onye eat ravenously.

Luyu is impatient to move on, as some of the men had been talking about how bad things are in the West. She says that what waits for them “is of the oldest evil […] deeper than humans” (306-7). She leaves to socialize a bit more, while Mwita and Onye fall back asleep.

When they wake up again, Onye asks Mwita to tell her the secret he’s been keeping from her. Mwita tells her that the reason Onye can “travel within” to alu, is because she received the ability from her mother. Onye realizes that the Kponyungo had been her mother, which Mwita confirms. He tells her that her mother would have passed initiation had she had the opportunity to try, and that she had learned the ability while on long journeys with her father, who would knowingly encourage her to fast. He tells her, finally, that when they were leaving Jwahir, Aro had been considering taking on Onye’s mother as a student.

Chapter 50 Summary

Onye discovers, through Luyu, that Diti and Fanasi are gone. When the sandstorm stopped for those two hours, while Ting was battling Daib’s magic to save Onye, they had taken the opportunity to escape, along with Sandi, the camel.

Ssaiku returns, bringing Sola along with him.

Chapter 51 Summary

Sola, Ssaiku, Mwita, Onye, and Ting sit together, drinking palm wine, for a time. Finally, Sola asks to see Onye’s hands to examine the markings. He then asks them to explain the incident; Mwita reveals that they’ve met Daib before, and that Daib is his former Master. “So it comes together now,” Sola says (315). Sola explains that Daib has grown “like a cancer”: “He is the one who will bring death to your precious East. He gathers thousands of men still crazed from the ease of wiping out so many Okekes in the West. He’s convinced them that greatness lies in spreading” (316). He further insults the Red People by telling Ssaiku and Ting they have the right idea by continually moving and hiding. Sola then reveals that Daib had once been his student.

Onye asks what she is expected to do. He tells her that she must rewrite the Great Book. This doesn’t make sense to Onye, but Sola asks her if she remembers “the images of light and dark? Beauty and ugliness? Clean and dirty? Good and evil? Night and day? Okeke and Nuru?” (318). Sola tells her not to go alu again, as Daib will kill her swiftly this time, and reminds her of her relative ignorance and inexperience.

Once they finish talking, Ting and Onye depart while they speak with Mwita alone. They share their stories of the old men’s misogyny; Ting, too, was laughed at initially until Sola threw the bones. Ting doesn’t know if Sola is human, either.

When they return to the campsite later, Mwita, too, discovers that Diti and Fanasi have departed. Mwita is enraged and feels betrayed by Fanasi for leaving because of a woman. Onye asks if he wouldn’t have done the same, and Mwita says no, then lets slip that he is going to die for Onye in this. Before he can explain, though, Ting stops the conversation and convinces them to rest.

Chapter 52 Summary

In the dead of night, Mwita, Onye, and Luyu leave Ssolu; Ssaiku gives them an hour without the storm, then warns them to keep moving if they’re caught in it again. However, their intent to leave without anyone noticing fails: the townspeople come to sing a song as a farewell to them.

As they walk, they realize that they are near water due to the humidity. When the sun rises, the heat becomes stifling, and they begin wearing their veils all the time to stay cool. At night, Onye thinks about what she must do, but despite her power, she can think only of the fact that she “should have been dead”: “the more the days passed, the more I just wanted to crawl into a cave and give up” (324).

Chapters 49-52 Analysis

Diti and Fanasi’s departure demonstrates the flip side of choice, loyalty, and destiny within the group. Their timing is particularly poignant symbolically: the only reason they can sneak away is because they choose to leave while Ssaiku lets the sandstorm die down to save Onye’s life. It isn’t enough that they are choosing to abandon Onye; they add insult to injury by choosing to leave when Onye’s life is in danger, and given that timing, they have no idea if she survived. Nevertheless, they make that choice in part because they do not know what the future holds for them. Interestingly, given how things turn out, it is likely that Fanasi would have died in Durfa even if Diti had managed to survive.

Conventionally, it is unsurprising, though important, that Sola was Daib’s master, and the relationship falls into the trope of the prized student gone astray. (Onye’s relationship with Daib is also of this kind of trope.) What’s interesting is Sola’s relative lack of regret—he doesn’t approve of Daib, but neither does he regret taking him on as a student. One almost gets the impression that Sola sees Daib as inevitable, like he has little faith that Onye will be able to stop him—and further, that he sees himself as something separate from the troubles between the Nuru and the Okeke. He is quick to criticize the Vah, but Sola is not on the ground battling Daib, either (although we are not told why this is).

However, Sola does make a further, deeper connection between storytelling and the way it shapes reality. In this case, in the novel, conceptions of storytelling, magic, and tradition come together in the Great Book, and we learn that it is not just a matter of people believing the tales, but that because of their writing, they really have no choice. In order to change society and save the world, Onye will literally have to rewrite the Great Book, making the way we interact with our mythical roots one of the key relationships in the novel.