Her mathematical skill and passion is something universal, rather than particular. But at the same time, she has outward ambitions and desires that go beyond what these traditions can accomodate. Binti is proud of her Himba heritage the traditions with which she has grown up are an essential part of her.

This is still the case in the future world of the novellas: the Himba rarely leave their desert territory, and they keep to something like their traditional ways of life but at the same time they are known for their cutting edge technology, which they sell to other peoples on Earth, and even to beings from other planets.īinti herself is a mathematical genius, who comes from a family who make their living by manufacturing astrolabes – handheld electronic computing and communications devices which are small enough to fit into a pocket, but at the same time evidently far more powerful than our present-day phones and other computing devices. This group is known today for the way that they strongly maintain their traditional practices and ways of life, while at the same time engaging fully with social and technological modernity, and the other peoples with whom they interact. The eponymous protagonist and narrator is a young woman from the Himba people of Namibia.

The Binti series is Afrofuturist science fiction. Indeed, the three together can be regarded as a single novel, both in terms of word length and in terms of imaginative scope. The three books individually are of novella length though the third installment is almost as long as the previous two combined. Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti: The Night Masquerade (available on January 16 – I was lucky to get to read a pre-publication copy) is the third (and at least for the moment, final) installment in the series that began with Binti (2015) and continued with Binti: Home (2017).

Binti by nnedi okorafor