Nnedi Okorafor
Akata Witch
© 2011
AKATA WITCH
NSIBIDI FOR “THIS IS ALL MINE”
To Sandra Marume, the spunky Igbo girl with the sharp tongue and mysterious ways, who just happened to be albino.
It’s been awhile, but I hope I captured you well.
And to my mother, who was terrified of masquerades as a kid and still is. This book dances with them. Enjoy.
Here, in the new venture, the extraordinary, the magical, the wonderful, and even the strange come out of the ordinary and the familiar.
– Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
PROLOGUE
I’ve always been fascinated by candles. Looking into the flame calms me down. Here in Nigeria, PHC is always taking the lights, so I keep candles in my room just in case.
PHC stands for “Power Holding Company of Nigeria,” but people like to say it really stands for “Please Hold Candles in Nigeria.” Back in Chicago we had ComEd, and the electricity was always working. Not here, though. Not yet. Maybe in the future.
One night, after the power went out, I lit a candle as usual. Then, also as usual, I got down on the floor and just gazed at its flame.
My candle was white and thick, like the ones in church. I lay on my belly and just stared and stared into it. So orange, like the abdomen of a firefly. It was nice and soothing until… it started flickering.
Then, I thought I saw something. Something serious and big and scary. I moved closer.
The candle just flickered like any other flame. I moved even closer, until the flame was an inch from my eyes. I could see something. I moved closer still. I was almost there. I was just starting to understand what I saw when the flame kissed something above my head. Then the smell hit me and the room was suddenly bright yellow orange! My hair was on fire!
I screamed and smacked my head as hard as I could. My burning hair singed my hand. Next thing I knew, my mother was there. She tore off her
The electricity suddenly came back on. My brothers ran in, then my father. The room smelled awful. My hair was half gone and my hands were tender.
That night, my mother cut my hair. Seventy percent of my lovely long hair, gone. But it was what I saw in that candle that stayed with me most. I’d seen the end of the world in its flame. Raging fires, boiling oceans, toppled skyscrapers, ruptured land, dead and dying people. It was horrible. And it was coming.
My name is Sunny Nwazue and I confuse people.
I have two older brothers. Like my parents, my brothers were both born here in Nigeria. Then my family moved to America, where I was born in the city of New York. When I was nine, we returned to Nigeria, near the town of Aba. My parents felt it would be a better place to raise my brothers and me, at least that’s what my mom says. We’re Igbo-that’s an ethnic group from Nigeria-so I’m American and Igbo, I guess.
You see why I confuse people? I’m Nigerian by blood, American by birth, and Nigerian again because I live here. I have West African features, like my mother, but while the rest of my family is dark brown, I’ve got light yellow hair, skin the color of “sour milk” (or so stupid people like to tell me), and hazel eyes that look like God ran out of the right color. I’m albino.
Being albino made the sun my enemy; my skin burned so easily that I felt nearly flammable. That’s why, though I was really good at soccer, I couldn’t join the boys when they played after school. Although they wouldn’t have let me anyway, me being a girl. Very narrow-minded. I had to play at night, with my brothers, when they felt like it.
Of course, this was all before that afternoon with Chichi and Orlu, when everything changed.
I look back now and see that there were signs of what was to come.
When I was two, I almost died from a bad case of malaria. I remember it. My brothers used to tell me that I was a freak because I could remember so far back.
I was really hot, absolutely burning up with fever. My mother stood over my bed, crying. I don’t remember my father being there much. My brothers would come in once in a while and pat my forehead or kiss my cheeks.
I was like that for days. Then a light came to me, like a tiny yellow flame or sun. It was laughing and warm-but a nice kind of warm, like bathwater that has been sitting for a few minutes. Maybe this is why I like candles so much. It floated just above me for a long time. I think it was watching over me. Sometimes mosquitoes would fly into it and get vaporized.
It must have decided that I wasn’t going to die, because eventually it went away and I got better. So it’s not as if strange things haven’t happened to me before.
I knew I looked like a ghost. All pale-skinned. And I was good at being ghost-quiet. When I was younger, if my father was in the main room drinking his beer and reading his paper, I’d sneak in. I could move like a mosquito when I wanted. Not the American ones that buzz in your ear-the Nigerian ones that are silent like the dead.
I’d creep up on my father, stand right beside him, and wait. It was amazing how he wouldn’t see me. I’d just
