Binti, The Complete Trilogy: Binti ; Home ; The Night Masquerade

by Nnedi Okorafor

  He looked at me as I approached, turned back to the desert, and continued working his hands. I paused, wondering if I was interrupting. I pushed on; I had to know. Plus, I’d seen several of them talking and laughing as they moved their hands like this, so I doubted it was like prayer or meditation.

  “Hi,” I said, hoping he’d stop moving his hands. He didn’t.

  “You should get some sleep,” he said.

  I cocked my head as I watched him. He was frowning as he pushed his blue sleeves back, held up his arms, and moved his hands in graceful swooping jabbing motions.

  “I will,” I said. I paused and took a breath. I wondered what would happen if I called up a current and connected it to his moving hands. Would the zap of it make him stop? “What is this that you’re doing?” I blurted. “With your hands? Can you control it?” I waited, cringing as I bit my lip. For a moment, he only worked his hands, his eyes staring into the desert.

  Then he looked up at me. “I’m communicating.”

  “But you do it when you . . . like now,” I said as he did a flourish with his hands. “You’re not talking to me right there. I don’t understand it, if you are. And I see people doing it while talking to other people, too.”

  He looked at me for a long time and then glanced at the camp and then back at me.

  “This is something your grandmother should tell you. Go ask her.”

  “I’m asking you,” I said. “You all do it, so why can’t I ask anyone?”

  He sighed and muttered, “Okay, sit down.”

  I sat beside him, pulling my legs to my chest.

  “Auntie Titi, your grandmother, is my grandfather’s best friend,” he said. “So I know all about your father and his shame. You have the same shame.”

  I blinked for a moment as two separate worlds tangled in my mind. Back when I was on the ship with the Meduse, they had referred to my edan as “shame” and now here was that word again, but in a completely different context. “I don’t underst—”

  “I saw how you looked at us,” he said. “Just like every Himba I have ever encountered, like we’re savages. You call us the ‘Desert People,’ mysterious uncivilized dark people of the sand.”

  I wanted to deny my prejudice, but he was right.

  “Despite the fact that you’re darker like us, have the crown like us, have our blood,” he said. “I wonder how surprised you were when you saw that we could speak your language as well as our three languages. ‘Desert People.’ Do you even know the actual name of our tribe?”

  I shook my head, slowly.

  “We’re the Enyi Zinariya,” he said. “No, I won’t translate that for you.” He looked directly at me, into my eyes, and I didn’t turn away. I wanted an answer to my initial question and I knew when I was being tested. There is nothing like being a harmonizer and looking directly into another harmonizer’s eyes. Nothing.

  Everything around us dropped away and there was a sonorous melody that vibrated between my ears that was so perfectly aligned that I felt as if I were beginning to float.

  “I only know what I am taught,” I whispered.

  “That’s not true,” he said.

  “I . . . I met one of you once,” I said.

  “We know,” he said. “And was she a savage?”

  “No.”

  “So you knew that back then.”

  “Okay,” I said, shutting my eyes and rubbing my forehead. “Okay.”

  He chuckled. “When we heard about what you did, we all cheered.”

  “Really?”

  He turned away from me, finished talking. “You should go. Get some sleep.”

  “Answer my question first,” I said. “Please.”

  “I did. I said we are communicating.”

  “With who?”

  “Everyone.”

  “As you speak to me, you’re speaking to others?”

  “It’s the same with your astrolabe,” he said. “Can’t you use it while you talk to other people?”

  “But no one is here.”

  “I was talking to my mother back in the village,” he said. “She was asking about you.”

  “Oh,” I said, frowning deeply. “So you can speak like how I speak to Okwu?”

  He paused and moved his hands. Then he turned to me and flatly said, “Ask your grandmother.”

  I was about to get up, but then I stopped and asked, “Crown? You said I have the crown like you?”

  He grasped a handful of his bushy red-brown hair, “This is the crown.” Then he laughed. “Well, you used to have it. Before the Meduse took it and replaced it with tentacles.”

  I wanted to be offended but the way he said it, in such a literal way, instead pulled a hard laugh out of me and suddenly we were both giggling. When I calmed down, the fatigue of the journey hit me and I slowly got up. “What was the name of your clan again?” I asked.

  “You’re Himba, I’m Enyi Zinariya,” he said.

  “Enyi Zinariya,” I repeated.

  He nodded, smiling. “You pronounce it well.”

  “Okay,” I said and went back to my grandmother’s tent, lay down, and was asleep within seconds.

  * * *

  “Get up, girl.”

  I opened my eyes to my grandmother’s face and the sound of the tent walls flapping from the wind. I stared into her eyes, blinking away the last remnants of sleep. When I sat up, I felt amazingly well rested. The cooling breeze of evening smelled so fresh that I flared my nostrils and inhaled deeply. I’d slept for nearly six hours.

  My grandmother smiled, the strong breeze blowing her bushy hair about. “Yes, it’s a good time to move across the desert.”

  The desert looked absolutely stunning, bright moonlight and the soft travel of the sand blending to make the ground look otherworldly. I could hear the others talking, laughing and moving about, and the two camels roaring as they were made to stand up. The smell of flat bread made my stomach grumble.

  “Grandma,” I said. “Please, tell me why the Enyi Zinariya speak with their hands.”

  Her eyes grew wide for a moment and I quickly said, “I’ve been planets away and learned about and met people from other worlds. It’s wrong that I don’t even know of my own . . . my own people.” I let out a breath as my words sunk into me. They were the truth now, a truth that had been different a day ago when I had been ashamed and quiet about my blood. Seeing the Night Masquerade had lived up to its mythology. To see it did signify immediate drastic change.

  “Walk with me,” my grandmother said, then she left the tent. I followed, grabbing my satchel. As we walked away from the camp, I saw two of the men go to our tent and start breaking it down. She led me up the nearest high sand dune. When we reached the top, she turned toward the camp and sat down. I sat beside her. Below, the camp was aflutter with activity, all the tents packed up except ours. I was clearly the last to wake up.

  “You’ve somehow learned the name of our clan.”

  “I asked Mwinyi.”

  “Having curiosity is the only way to learn,” she said. She worked her hands before her for a moment and then looked at me. “That was me communicating with your father.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “You Himba are so inward-looking,” she said. “Cocooned around that pink lake, growing your technology from knowledge harvested from deep within your genius, you girls and women dig up your red clay and hide beneath it. You’re an interesting people who have been on those lands for generations. But you’re a young people. The Enyi Zinariya are old old Africans.

  “And contrary to what you all believe, we have technology that puts yours to shame and we’ve had it for centuries.” She paused, letting this news sink in. It wasn’t sinking in to me easily. All that she’d said was so contrary to all that I had been taught that I’d begun to feel a little dizzy.


  “We didn’t create it, though,” she continued. “It was brought to us by the Zinariya. Those who were there documented the Zinariya times, but the files were kept on paper and paper does not last. So all we really know is what elders read and then what the elders after those elders remembered and then what the next elders remembered and so on.

  “The Zinariya came to us in the desert. They were a golden people, who glinted in the sun. They were solar and had landed in Earth’s desert to rest and refuel on their way to Oomza Uni.”

  I couldn’t control myself. “What?” I shrieked.

  She chuckled. “Yes. We ‘Desert People’ knew of Oomza Uni before other people on Earth even had mobile phones!”

  “Oh my goodness,” I whispered. I couldn’t imagine anyone on Earth back then being able to comprehend the very idea of Oomza Uni. Human beings on Earth hadn’t even had real contact with people from outside yet, and the nonhumans who had had contact with extraterrestrials never bothered to convey anything to human beings. It was centuries later and I, who had been there, was still trying to wrap my brain around the sheer greatness of Oomza Uni.

  “Our clan was even smaller and nomadic back then, and we became fast friends with the Zinariya. Though many of them left for Oomza within a few months, a few stayed with us for many years before going on to Oomza. Before leaving, they gave us something to help us communicate with them wherever they were and with each other wherever we were. They also called this ‘zinariya.’ It was a living organism tailored for our blood that every member of the clan drank into his or her system with water. Biological nanoids so tiny that they could comfortably embed themselves into our brains. Once you had them in you, it was like having an astrolabe in your nervous system. You could eat, hear, smell, see, feel, even sense it.”

  How had I not been able to guess this? Not that it was due to alien technology, but that they were working with a platform. They were manipulating a virtual platform like the ones astrolabes could project! One that only the Enyi Zinariya could see and access. I felt a sting of shame as I realized why I hadn’t understood something so obvious. My own prejudice. I had been raised to view the Desert People, the Enyi Zinariya, as a primitive, savage people plagued by a genetic neurological disorder. So that’s what I saw.

  My grandmother nodded, a knowing smirk on her face. “And once the zinariya was in those who drank it, the nanoids were passed on to offspring through their DNA.” She stopped talking and looked at me, waiting. Seconds passed and I frowned, anxious. I was about to ask if she’d told me all she was going to tell me when it exploded in my mind. My world went fuzzy for a moment and I was glad that I was sitting down. I shut my eyes and grasped at the first mathematical equation I could. Equations were always rotating around me like moons and this thought was soothing. Gently, I let myself tree. Then I opened my eyes, calm and balanced, and faced a very jarring bit of information.

  “My father has the zinariya in him,” I said.

  My grandmother was looking at me, smirking. “Yes.”

  “And so do I and all my siblings.”

  “Yes.”

  “We carry alien technology.”

  “Yes.”

  The information tried to knock me down and I sunk deeper into meditation. If I wanted to, I could call up a current and send it streaming across the sand. I am Himba, I said to myself between the splitting and splitting fractals of equations, my most soothing pattern. I am Himba, even if my hair has become okuoko because of my actions and even if I have Enyi Zinariya blood. Even if my DNA is alien.

  “Binti,” my grandmother softly said.

  “Why can’t I see it? Why can’t any of my siblings or my father? None of us goes about waving our hands, manipulating objects that no one else can see.”

  “Your father can and does,” she said. “When he so chooses. Didn’t I tell you I’d just communicated with him? You think a son would abandon his mother? Just because he marries a Himba woman and decides to use his harmonizing skill in ‘civilization’ instead of the hinterland?”

  I sighed and pressed my hands to my forehead. I felt so strange. This was all so strange.

  “If you could reach my father, why’d you need me to reach out to Okwu?”

  “To see if you could,” she said, smiling.

  I frowned.

  “Now listen,” she said. “The zinariya cannot just be used. It has to be switched on; it has to be activated. If it is not, you can live your whole life without even knowing it’s in you. As you have.”

  “How does one switch it on?”

  “The clan priestess does it. The Ariya. You will meet her tomorrow.”

  * * *

  I wanted to turn back.

  Oh, I wanted to turn back so badly. Enough was enough was enough was enough. I could have made it home. Then I could have still made the trek out onto the salt trails on my own and caught up with the women and completed my pilgrimage. I could have become a whole woman in my clan, a complete Himba woman. All I had to do was walk into the darkness and use my astrolabe to tell me which way to go. However, we were days into the hinterland and if something did not kill me in the night, my lack of food or a proper water-gathering capture station would.

  Plus, I didn’t want to turn back. Why don’t I ever want to do what I’m supposed to do?

  * * *

  So I went with Grandmother. I went with the Desert People.

  It was another forty-eight hours of walking during the night, sleeping during the day, eating dates, flat bread, and palm-oil-rich Enyi Zinariya stews. Three more times, I saw Mwinyi protect us from packs of predatory animals—once from another pack of wild dogs and twice from hyenas. And I watched the Enyi Zinariya with new eyes; I especially watched their hands.

  In the meantime, I barely touched my astrolabe. There was so much around me to take in; I just didn’t need it. Nor did I touch the pieces of my edan; I didn’t want to think about it. Okwu checked on me once that second day and was even curter than it was the first time.

  You okay, Binti?

  Yes.

  Good.

  That was all. On the third, it didn’t check in at all. I tried reaching it later that day as I had the first time, but it didn’t respond. I wondered what it was doing back at the Root, but I wasn’t worried. My grandmother was in touch with my father, so everyone knew everything anyway.

  * * *

  On the fourth night, the land changed. We simply came to the end of the sand dunes and the beginning of smooth white limestone. And soon after that, we reached a sudden drop and before I could understand what was happening and what I was seeing, I heard joyous ululating.

  Gold People

  The Enyi Zinariya lived in a vast network of caves in a huge limestone cliff. Within the bowels of these caves were winding staircases that led from cave to cave, family to family. Some caves were tiny, no larger than a closet, others were as vast as the Root. Upon arrival, I was taken for a quick tour of my grandmother’s family’s caves. I met so many of her people, young to old, all enthusiastically waving their hands about, that I could not understand the logic of where people lived.

  It seemed everyone could stay wherever he or she was most comfortable, from child to elder. I saw a cave where an old man and his teenage granddaughter lived, the girl’s parents (one of whom was the old man’s daughter) living in a cave connected by a narrow tunnel. The old man and granddaughter were both obsessed with studying, collecting, and documenting stones, so their cave was full of stone piles and stacks of yellowing paper with scribbled research.

  “Best to just have only one cave full of rocks,” her mother told me with a laugh. “Those two are happy together.” My grandmother’s cave was tiny, but sparse and tidy with colorful shaggy blue rugs, delicate mobiles hanging from the ceiling made of crystals one of her daughters had collected, and bottles of scented oils they specialized in making. The room also
smelled immaculate.

  It was brightly lit by a large circular solar lamp in the room’s center. What was most striking was that my grandmother’s cave was full of plants. It reminded me of one of the Third Fish’s breathing rooms. There were pots with leafy green vines tumbling out of them hung near the high ceiling beside her bed. There were several large woven baskets full of sand with complex light green treelike succulents growing from them and dry bioluminescent vines that grew directly on the cave’s walls. Right there in the cave, my grandmother was growing five different types of tomatoes, three types of peppers, and some type of fruiting plant that I could not name.

  “I’m a botanist,” she said, putting her satchel down. “Your grandfather was, too.”

  “Was?”

  She nodded. “He was Himba.” And that was all she would say, though there was clearly so much more. I wanted to ask why he left the Himba and if he stayed in touch at all. I wanted to ask how he felt when my father decided to leave and return to the Himba. I wanted to ask if this was where my father had stayed when he was a child. I wanted to ask why she loved plants. I wanted to ask why she lived alone when everyone else in the village lived happily with many, even in the smaller caves. Instead, I looked at my grandmother’s many thriving plants and breathed the lush air that smelled so different from the other caves and the dry desert outside.

  I stopped at a small yellow flower growing from a dry root in a pot bigger than my hand. This was the same type of flower that had been growing on the edan years ago when I’d found it.

  “What’s this one?” I asked.