Moon Witch, Spider King

Keme, the shapeshifting lion and Marshall of the Red Army, is the only character who is able to see through Sogolon’s rage to the wounded woman underneath. Sogolon’s first encounter with him is marked by sexual desire. She sees him emerging from a river naked, and her attraction is immediate and intense. For his part, Keme sees something in her, but he is torn by duty and ambition. He aims for a higher position in the King’s army, and his duties take him away from Sogolon. Keme also has a secret: He is half-lion, and he fears this will hold back his career advancement. Once his secret is out, however, his men accept him. Keme may be James’s proxy for closeted gay men who harbor their secret until, upon revealing it, often realize that all the secrecy was a waste of time.

Keme and Sogolon establish a caring, nurturing relationship based on her acceptance of his identity and his love for her (a vital emotional gift for someone who has been told, explicitly and implicitly, that she doesn’t deserve it). Sogolon’s past, however, ultimately dooms their happiness when the Aesi’s men kill their son, Ehede, and Keme can’t help but blame her. Their estrangement lasts beyond his death, but she reconnects with his progeny—wild lions in the savanna—and their reunion provides a measure of closure for her. Keme is the untamed side of the human beast, the animal sexuality and fierce pride that civilized society tries to ignore but exists within all people.

The unnamed Aesi—his true name is known only to his mother—is the devil on the king’s shoulder, the manipulative puppet master steering policy to favor his own interests. He is cast in the mold of Alladin’s Grand Vizier or Tolkien’s Grima Wormtongue. A fantasy archetype, these figures manipulate powerful figureheads into committing acts against the kingdom’s interests, but the Aesi falls into a category all his own. Not only does he order the purging of all accused witches—a man’s accusation is the equivalent of a guilty verdict—but his minions, the demon Sangomin, obey his commands and carry out his acts of terror. While most evil advisors are mortal and vulnerable, the Aesi cannot die unless killed before his 12th birthday. His powers vary based on his incarnation, but they include some form of mind control. In his role as chancellor to Kwash Moki, he is responsible for the widespread memory loss that infects the kingdom. His is the ideal superpower to enshrine totalitarian rule in perpetuity—without memory of oppression, no rebellion has cause to rise up. The Aesi is Sogolon’s nemesis, her reason for living beyond a normal lifespan—she blames him for the death of her son, an emotional wound she will never recover from, and killing the Aesi—permanently—is her only hope to kill the pain.

Mistress Komwono, exiled from the court of the North kingdom and living in Kongor, takes Sogolon from her abusive life with Miss Azora and puts her to work as a servant. She attempts to “civilize” the young Mitu bush girl, but Sogolon refuses to be tamed. There is an artifice to Komwono’s mission to be reinstated at court; the court patrons are a scheming, sycophantic lot, and she wants to rejoin their ranks. Her imperious demeanor suggests that she believes herself to be above Kongorians and that regality is her birthright. Her lessons—how to behave at court, how not to betray her “lower” social status—resemble etiquette school, a place where women are groomed to fit into elite social circles. On another level, however, Mistress Komwono is a metaphor for colonization, in which Europeans saw their duty as “civilizing” the untamed African continent. In reality, that goal meant imposing European culture on conquered countries. Her “gift” of Sogolon to the royal court suggests that she does not seek to improve the life of her young charge so much as to make her an acceptable bartering chip to insinuate herself back into the king’s good graces.

Emini, sister of prince Likud (the future Kwash Moki), takes an interest in Sogolon when she is presented at court. While she may see the young girl as little more than a curiosity, her interest keeps Sogolon alive during Kwash Moki’s witch purges. Her relationship with Sogolon is a complex one—part mistress/servant, part mentor/protégé, and part confessor/therapist, Sogolon never quite knows where she stands with the King Sister. She admires the woman’s cunning, but she is just as likely to receive a slap across the face as a vulnerable or tender word. Emini is the brains behind the crown, the clever plotter behind the impetuous and cruel Likud, and when her brother discovers her plot to bear a son—a true heir to the throne—he banishes her to Mantha, ambushing and killing her on the way. On the road to Mantha with Sogolon at her side, she exhibits true solidarity with her servant when she shows her a linen scroll, kept secretly wrapped around her body, bearing drawings and imagery of a mighty city that she has seen in dreams. Perhaps she senses her imminent death and wants to safeguard the scroll with Sogolon, but whatever the reason, her gift of the scroll places them at last on equal footing. In the end, the King Sister deems her servant a peer.

The retired war hero, Olu, is the primary victim of the Aesi’s memory purge. As an aging veteran, no one thinks twice when he exhibits signs of dementia (calling for an ex-wife that no one remembers, for example). He has the wherewithal to begin transcribing memories in his room before he forgets them, memories that Sogolon deciphers over time. She reasons that he is not an irrational old man, but someone who sees behind the curtain of the Aesi’s deceit but cannot remember what he knows. Olu rages against his dying memory, struggling to retain what little he can. He embodies the novel’s theme of memory and its link to self-identity. Without his memory, his heroic deeds, and his marriage to Jeleza, the King Sister of Kwash Kagar, his status as a revered warrior are all dust. What remains is a shell of the man, an aging body desperately scribbling cryptic words on walls and tapestries, hoping to stave off the inevitable loss of everything he once knew.

The son of Kwash Kagar and next in line to the throne of Fasisi (unless his sister, Emini, gives birth to a son), Likud is a pale, petulant, and vengeful man. He has none of his sister’s wit or wisdom, and he envies her keen understanding of court politics. That envy emerges as pettiness and spite, and when he assumes the throne, he reveals his true nature: a cruel tyrant who is not above murdering his sister to hold on to power. Likud is every ruler who covers their insecurity by resorting to authoritarianism. While he may not possess Emini’s understanding of the subtleties of court politics, he is paranoid enough to sense a threat and eradicate it. His pettiness and cruelty make him the ideal pawn for the Aesi’s manipulations.

Yétúnde, Keme’s wife, is the dutiful mother and housekeeper, raising their children, cooking their meals, and tending to the home. She seems unbothered when Keme brings Sogolon home—just another man doing what men do in this patriarchal society. Her patient exterior masks a secret, however: She knows her husband is a shapeshifter, half-man, half-lion. In fact, she gave birth to several lion cubs, but she killed and buried them. Oddly, Keme knows none of this, which speaks to the strict roles of men and women in this society. Men plant their seeds and reap the rewards of progeny, but the birth process is the purview of mothers and midwives. Yétúnde’s hatred of her husband’s true nature represents fear of all things different. She claims she did it because they would be shunned in their village, regarded as outcasts, but she is placing social status above the lives of her children. It speaks to the disposable nature of life in environments where strict cultural codes dominate people’s lives.

The water sprite, Bunshi, a demigoddess of the river, is the organizer of Sogolon’s mission to kill the child Aesi. She lures Sogolon from her jungle home, brings her and her great-great-granddaughter, Nsaka, together, and gathers the other members of the team: Tracker, Leopard, and the Ogo. She also kept tabs on Sogolon during her long years of lost memory, and she and Ikede fill in those gaps. Despite her desperate need to see the quest through to the end, her motivations are murky. Sogolon distrusts her, fearing she is manipulating the members of the team for her own ends—she believes she saw Bunshi on the shore holding the child Aesi after the unsuccessful attempt to kill him. The water sprite implies she wants to end the Aesi’s reign of terror for the good of all, as his malevolence will change the world forever. Her power enables her to melt away and then reappear unexpectedly, and her constant disappearances only add to her suspicious nature. In the end, she is killed by the Aesi. Her true motives may never be known, but one thing is certain—without her as ringleader (and narrative device), Sogolon’s third act would never happen.

Tracker, the bounty hunter with an uncanny sense of smell, is recruited by Bunshi to help track the child Aesi. A holdover from the trilogy’s first novel, Black Leopard Red Wolf, Tracker is defiantly his own man, sure of his skills and wary of anyone who tries to challenge his autonomy. He also possesses the magical skill of the Sangomin—he is able to open any of the “ten and nine” portals. He has sexual relationships with both Leopard and Mossi, and his sexuality is another way James upends the narrative norms of the fantasy genre: He can be both a strong warrior and in love with a man. He even depicts Tracker and Mossi as parents raising a brood of children in a hollowed-out baobab tree. Gone too is the requirement that heroes be silent and stoic; Tracker weeps and grieves over the deaths of Leopard and Mossi. Tracker, Leopard, and Mossi are committed to each other emotionally as well as sexually, and Tracker is scarred by the deaths of his lovers and his children just as much as any straight protagonist.

The King Sister to the current monarch, Kwash Dara, has already been banished to Mantha when she enters the story. Like Emini, Lissisolo plots to bear a son who can assume the throne, and when she does, Kwash Dara and the Aesi plan to kidnap him and take him out of the line of succession. Finding the boy is the major plot driver of the trilogy’s first novel, which then overlaps with the latter part of Moon Witch, Spider King. Like many of the characters in the novel, Lissisolo is sometimes unreadable. While she seems determined to undermine the Kwash line of the monarchy and to install her son as the rightful heir, those actions would do little to change the patriarchal tendencies of the throne. When the queen of Dolingo suggests she assume the throne herself and the two women rule side by side, she disappears into the Mweru, waiting for her son to be returned. She is defiant enough to bear a child against the king’s wishes but still subservient to what she sees as the natural order of things.

Ikede is noteworthy not only for his role as a griot—bards and storytellers are fantasy archetypes, and his inclusion represents James’s adherence to those standards—but for his role as southern griot, the only clan to adopt a written form of record keeping. James toys with the written-versus-oral debate here, and while postcolonial literature tends to favor oral traditions, the advantages of keeping textual records are clear. With the Aesi wiping memories all over the kingdom, the written word is the only way to preserve knowledge. Without those written transcriptions, Ikede could never fill in Sogolon’s memory lapses. More than simply a historian, Ikede once had a wife and children, but when the Aesi realized that rooting out every southern griot and killing them would be impossible, he resorted to killing their loved ones. The night before Sogolon and Tracker depart for Dolingo, Ikede sings one final song—something he hasn’t done in 30 years—and then flings himself from his rooftop in grief.