Things Fall Apart

Chapter 10 begins with a trial, presided over and witnessed only by men. Women “[look] on from the fringe like outsiders” (87). Before the elders, who sit on stools, is another row of stools for the “two little groups” that await trial: a woman, Mgbafo, who waits quietly with her brothers; and her husband, Uzowulu, who speaks loudly with his relatives (87). The surrounding crowd speaks, too, and “from a distance the noise [is] a deep rumble carried by the wind” (88).

Women and children run when a gong sounds, summoning “a pandemonium of quavering voices” from the egwugwu house, where the ancestors “[greet] themselves in their esoteric language” (88). Women run because the secrets of the egwugwu remain a mystery to them: “No woman ever [asks] questions about the most powerful and the most secret cult in the clan” (88). As the nine egwugwu, or “masked spirits,” each of whom “[represents] a village of the clan,” emerge, the women flee completely (89).

The leader of the egwugwu, Evil Forest, calls to Umuofia’s elders, then leads the egwugwus’ procession to the stools. Achebe’s narrator recognizes Okonkwo’s “springy walk” among the spirits, but he acknowledges that, in the

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