Deep Space and the African Frontier

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 95
Nnedi Okorafor, Binti

On the cusp of young adulthood, Binti, a maiden of the Himba people of Namibia, receives word she’s been accepted to Oomza University, the galaxy’s most prestigious institution of higher learning. But attending means leaving her homeland, something no Himba has ever attempted. Still, Binti accepts her family’s scorn, because her gift for mathematics offers so much potential. Only when she’s off Earth, however, does she discover how violent and fraught the galaxy really is.

Attempting to summarize this novella feels slightly disingenuous, because author Okorafor deliberately subverts our expectations. Early pages (this book is so short, it doesn’t even have chapter divisions) channel familiar science fiction stereotypes, from Isaac Asimov and Orson Scott Card to Starfleet Academy. The “young person venturing to discover herself among the stars” boilerplate is so familiar, even veteran genre authors struggle to to prevent it sounding overused and tired.

Then, somewhere around page 20, Okorafor completely reverses everything. Exactly what happens is too important to reveal. And though it happens very early, in a book running under 100 pages, that’s a pretty significant investment. Okorafor deliberately leads audiences into thinking they’re reading a comfy sci-fi boilerplate, then upends what we’ve been coached to expect. Suddenly Binti is alone, scared, and certain she’s going to die in the silence between the stars.

This encapsulates the theme, not only of this novella, but of much of Okorafor’s work. Caught in the push-pull between tradition and modernity, Okorafor’s heroines often struggle to mark a path that embraces the one, without excluding the other. Can a gifted but provincial girl from a settled people really join an integrated, multicultural galaxy? Must she choose between her people’s old-fashioned ways, and the larger society’s demands for assimilation? I’ll answer beforehand: not easily.

Nnedi Okorafor

Binti feels her people’s call. She wants what her family wants, including useful work, marriage, and a family among her kinfolk and ancestors. But she believes she can’t achieve her true potential living in her father’s shadow, making pocket technology for the village. (Oops, the people’s purity is already compromised, but in a way they can conveniently rationalize.) With the bravado only teenagers can muster, she flees her homeland after nightfall, running away to join the stars.

If only everything were as morally distinct as it appears from ground level. Binti soon discovers Oomza University’s scientists have a history of taking things that don’t belong to them. Their justification is purely humane and reasonable: we need to know and understand the various species of the galaxy. But the Meduse, a poor but dauntless species, doesn’t forget when they’ve had something sacred stolen from them. Soon Binti is the only one who can broker a peaceful solution.

The Himba are a real people, resident in northern Namibia. (Daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Okorafor often uses African peoples in her fiction.) Okorafor uses their famous rituals, adapted appropriately to reflect her technologically altered future, to express a people who have retained their identity amid the galaxy’s push for mechanical sameness. Binti’s willingness to retain some of her people’s rituals, while judiciously discarding others, becomes the trait that saves her from someone else’s war.

Okorafor calls her style “magic futurism.” Many of her books incorporate aspects of folk magic and traditional beliefs. However, she concedes, the constant march of technology, and the cultural and environmental changes it forces, mean peoples aren’t eternal. Societies change under pressure; even Binti’s very traditional father makes his living building “astrolabes,” similar to tablet computers, but much more powerful and complex. His people’s rituals make him a technological adept, a sort of futurist wizard.

Okorafor and her publisher originally intended this novella to be freestanding, separate from her other books. She mostly writes for the lucrative Young Adult market, though she’s written a handful of novels for adults, too. But this novella’s success (Nebula and Hugo awards, plus multiple further nominations) led her to create a trilogy. The second and third volumes are full-length novels, expanding themes introduced in the first novella. They’re intended to be read in sequence.

Dedicated readers could polish off this novella in under one afternoon. Despite the density of Okorafor’s internationalist themes, it doesn’t demant slow, ponderous reading. It has enough science fantasy gee-whiz to propel audiences along briskly, never bogging down in minutiae. But it also has sufficient threads driving it, of modernity versus tradition, of internationalism versus identity, of technology versus family to satisfy intellectually demanding readers. It’s complex, yet quick. And it lingers long after you set it down.