Binti

The first novella in the series, Binti, introduces the reader to its title character. Binti is a 16-year-old young woman of an ethnic group on Earth named the Himba. The Himba are a traditional group who “didn’t like to leave the homeland” (2). Binti is a “master harmonizer” of her people; she can “communicate with spirit flow and convince them to become one current” (16). Binti is thus the first of her people to attend the renowned Oomza University, an intergalactic institution. When Binti discovers that she has been accepted and granted scholarships, she runs away from home and boards a ship to the university without alerting her friends or family. The novella begins with Binti leaving home:

Now the weight of my entire life was pressing on my shoulders. I was defying the most traditional part of myself for the first time in my entire life. I was leaving in the dead of night and they had no clue. My nine siblings, all older than me except for my younger sister and brother, would never see this coming (2).

Although she has only just left, Binti misses her ancestral home, named the Root, and her father’s astrolabe shop. An astrolabe is a complicated technology that holds its user’s identity; it allows people to communicate and store data. It also holds five possible casts of its user’s future. Binti is a master harmonizer and already makes better astrolabes than her father does. Binti has never been away from home before, and she worries that she has made a mistake: “My prospects of marriage had been 100 percent and now they would be zero. No man wanted a woman who’d run away” (3). Binti clings to the remnants of normalcy, even though she has left it behind.

Binti finally boards the living ship known as Third Fish, “a type of ship closely related to a shrimp” (8). While onboard the ship bound for Oomza University, Binti finds kinship amongst many academics and scholars. Binti teaches her friends how to “tree,” or how to meditate using mathematical equations, to “imagine the most complex equation and then split it in half and then in half again and again” (9). Binti develops a crush on a Khoush boy named Heru, who notices that her hair is braided into a mathematical pattern.

The Meduse attacks the Third Fish while it is in transit to Oomza. The Meduse are a jellyfish-like alien race that is known for their aggression and warmongering tendencies. The Meduse and the Khoush have been at war for years. They kill everyone on board the ship except for Binti and the pilot. The massacre is also known as moojh-ha ki-bira, or “the great wave” (12). Binti reveals that the Meduse worship water, which the Khoush view as inferior. Binti discovers that her edan, an ancient artifact she discovered when she was a child, has protected her from the Meduse; the artifact is poisonous to them.

However, the edan also allows Binti to communicate with the Meduse; after hiding in her room for days, she discovers that she can hear their voices through her door. Although they try to convince her to open the door, she refuses to do so. Eventually, the Meduse enter her room and a young, hotheaded Meduse named Okwu, who had attempted to kill her prior, questions Binti about the red clay on her skin. Binti realizes that her otjize, mixed clay that women of her people apply to their body and hair, can heal the Meduse. Okwu returns with orders from its chief to get more otjize; Binti does not agree to its request but asks for water and food.

Later, Okwu tells Binti that they aim to kill everyone at Oomza University to get their chief’s stinger, which Khoush students had stolen and mutilated. Binti manages to convince Okwu that she will be able to broker a truce between the Khoush scholars at Oomza and the Meduse. Binti is taken to the chief of the Meduse, and it is revealed that its stinger was exhibited at the Oomza museum without consent. The Meduse believe that Binti cannot represent them while she clings to her edan; the artifact would betray how Binti distrusts the Meduse. Binti finally agrees, and she puts her edan down. When she does, a Meduse stings Binti, and she is now able to communicate with them without her edan.

Upon their arrival at the university, Binti brokers peace between the Khoush and the Meduse; the stinger is returned to the chief of the Meduse, and Okwu joins Binti at the school as a student. The head of the mathematics department, Okpala, asks if Binti will be welcome home again, considering that she is now an outsider. It is only then that Binti realizes that her hair has become a mass of tentacles, of okuoko. She is now part Meduse. Over the weeks that Binti is at Oomza University, she becomes close friends with Okwu. When she makes otjize from the clay and plants found on the Oomza University campus, Binti tries to heal Okwu’s wounds with it. Binti is successful; she has recreated her family’s traditional otjize. The novella ends after Okwu encourages Binti to call her family; she does, and her mother answers.