When elephants fight, the grass suffers.
The treaty that Binti created in the first novella of this trilogy is now over. The tensions between the Khoush and the Meduse erupted into violence again, this time on planet Earth, and her tribe is caught in the middle. Binti hasn’t even had time to process all the new information she’s learned about her heritage (or the new abilities that come with that information); now she has to rescue her Muduse friend Okwu find out if any of her family survived.
The first part of Nnedi Okorafor’s trilogy about a young Himba woman from a far-future Earth won the Hugo award for Best Novella in 2016. The second part was nominated for a Hugo this year. I decided get a head start on next year’s Hugo reading by picking up the final installment, since I’m pretty sure this one will get a nomination as well.
The Binti trilogy has always been told in the places where the ancient and the traditional meets the new and alien. The Himba tribe are famous for mathematical abilities and for the astrolabes they create, and at the same time they keep the customs that the indigenous people of Namibia have kept for centuries. Binti herself travels to another planet still wearing the red clay-based otjize on all exposed skin; she now also uses otjize to cover the crystal-blue tentacles she has in place of braids, a gift of alien DNA from the Meduse.
Meanwhile, her tribe has always looked down on the nearby Enyi Zinariya as desert savages (similar to how many people look down on the Himba) so it was a shock to Binti in the last novella to not only find out that her father comes from a Zinariya family, but the Zinariya themselves have alien DNA, and are in many ways more advanced than any other race on Earth.
The third novella begins with Binti and her new Zinariya friend Mwinyi racing on camelback towards her home (flanked by the wild dogs that Mwinyi is able to communicate with), the site of a vicious Khoush attack. The author paints the scenery in the glowing colors of the desert, in the strange number-based images when Binti uses her mathematical abilities to try to calm herself, and in flashbacks of the Zinariya, showing when the glowing gold aliens arrived on Earth and shared their gifts with the tribe that welcomed them. Binti is having to cope with the latent zinariya abilities that her grandmother brought to life, along with the terrifying visions – which may or may not be real – of her family burning alive after the Khoush attack.
Mwinyi may not have known what we’d find there, but I did. Charred bones. My family was dead. My family was dead. My family was dead…five five five five five five five five five five five.
Binti’s family spent a lot of the previous novella telling her how much she’d hurt her family by running away to a university on another planet, how much risk she’d put them into by bringing home a dangerous alien from a race that had been at war with an equally dangerous alien race, by flaunting her strange non-human abilities to the point where the Night Masquerade (which only shows itself to boys) has singled her out.
Now she finds…they were right. The attack by the Khoush wasn’t her fault, but it did happen because of her. If she hadn’t run away to university, made a friend of one of the aliens who slaughtered her classmates, and then brought it to her world, her tribe would never have been caught in the crossfire. It’s an odd tone to have in a futuristic trilogy about learning and adventure, and it adds an extra level to the nightmare, and one more reason for Binti to try to resolve the conflict before any other members of her tribe are killed. And there are no easy answers, because if there’s one thing that every living thing seems to share, it’s that we’re incapable of forgetting that we’ve been hurt – either as a race or an individual – even if we don’t remember the specifics.
“If I ask each of you the reason, you’ll cite different stories from so long ago that the grandchildren of the grandchildren of any possible witnesses are long dead.”
I can’t get into too much more about the story without giving things away; part of the power of this trilogy is that the pacing is completely different from most stories I’ve read, and the plot never went where I was expecting it to. There were times when I wished that these had been novels instead of novellas. There’s so much detail crammed into so little space, it meant many things were never fully explained (astrolabes, Deep Culture, whatever the psionic ability is that lets Binti run electrical currents 
through objects with her mind). And with less space to draw out the story, some of the climactic moments involved elements that were introduced maybe a few pages ahead of time, which felt a little like someone inventing magic powers just in time to save the day.
But I also wanted more of the setting, more of the characters, more of the weird alien technology, more of the beautiful images and the violence and the joy and the fear of change and the total transformation that happens whether the characters want it to or not.