Free Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

where titled men climb trees and pound foo-foo for their wives.”
    “All their customs are upside-down. They do not decide bride-price as we do, with sticks. They haggle and bargain as if they were buying a goat or a cow in the market.”
    “That is very bad,” said Obierika’s eldest brother. “Butwhat is good in one place is bad in another place. In Umunso they do not bargain at all, not even with broomsticks. The suitor just goes on bringing bags of cowries until his in-laws tell him to stop. It is a bad custom because it always leads to a quarrel.”
    “The world is large,” said Okonkwo. “I have even heard that in some tribes a man’s children belong to his wife and her family.”
    “That cannot be,” said Machi. “You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the children.”
    “It is like the story of white men who, they say, are white like this piece of chalk,” said Obierika. He held up a piece of chalk, which every man kept in his
obi
and with which his guests drew lines on the floor before they ate kola nuts. “And these white men, they say, have no toes.”
    “And have you never seen them?” asked Machi.
    “Have you?” asked Obierika.
    “One of them passes here frequently,” said Machi. “His name is Amadi.”
    Those who knew Amadi laughed. He was a leper, and the polite name for leprosy was “the white skin.”

C HAPTER N INE
    For the first time in three nights, Okonkwo slept. He woke up once in the middle of the night and his mind went back to the past three days without making him feel uneasy. He began to wonder why he had felt uneasy at all. It was like a man wondering in broad daylight why a dream had appeared so terrible to him at night. He stretched himself and scratched his thigh where a mosquito had bitten him as he slept. Another one was wailing near his right ear. He slapped the ear and hoped he had killed it. Why do they always go for one’s ears? When he was a child his mother had told him a story about it. But it was as silly as all women’s stories. Mosquito, she had said, had asked Ear to marry him, whereupon Ear fell on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. “How much longer do you think you will live?” she asked. “You are already a skeleton.” Mosquito went away humiliated, and any time he passed her way he told Ear that he was still alive.
    Okonkwo turned on his side and went back to sleep. He was roused in the morning by someone banging on his door.
    “Who is that?” he growled. He knew it must be Ekwefi.Of his three wives Ekwefi was the only one who would have the audacity to bang on his door.
    “Ezinma is dying,” came her voice, and all the tragedy and sorrow of her life were packed in those words.
    Okonkwo sprang from his bed, pushed back the bolt on his door and ran into Ekwefi’s hut.
    Ezinma lay shivering on a mat beside a huge fire that her mother had kept burning all night.
    “It is
iba,”
said Okonkwo as he took his machete and went into the bush to collect the leaves and grasses and barks of trees that went into making the medicine for
iba.
    Ekwefi knelt beside the sick child, occasionally feeling with her palm the wet, burning forehead.
    Ezinma was an only child and the center of her mother’s world. Very often it was Ezinma who decided what food her mother should prepare. Ekwefi even gave her such delicacies as eggs, which children were rarely allowed to eat because such food tempted them to steal. One day as Ezinma was eating an egg Okonkwo had come in unexpectedly from his hut. He was greatly shocked and swore to beat Ekwefi if she dared to give the child eggs again. But it was impossible to refuse Ezinma anything. After her father’s rebuke she developed an even keener appetite for eggs. And she enjoyed above all the secrecy in which she now ate them. Her mother always took her into their bedroom and shut the door.
    Ezinma did not call her mother
Nne
like all children. She called her by her name,