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