We were the best and we pushed each other to get closer to “God. None of us would have made it into the university if we couldn’t tree, but it’s not easy. When you do math fractals long enough, you kick yourself into treeing just enough to get lost in the shallows of the mathematical sea.

Yet they were girls who knew what I meant when I spoke of “treeing.” We sat in my room (because, having so few travel items, mine was the emptiest) and challenged each other to look out at the stars and imagine the most complex equation and then split it in half and then in half again and again. They were girls who could not stand the rays of Earth’s sun unless it was shining through a tinted window. Her name is Binti, and she is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy.

They believe in staying close to their native land and that women should cover their bodies and hair in otjize, a mixture primarily. Binti is a teenage girl from Earth, a member of the marginalized and disrespected Himba culture, and the. She is a teenager and Himba, a people from southwestern Africa. The prolific Okorafor, who refers to the category of African-centered science-fiction she writes as Africanfuturism, currently has a number of projects in the works. They were all girls who grew up in sprawling houses, who’d never walked through the desert, who’d never stepped on a snake in the dry grass. Okorafors sci-fi novella tackles sprawling ideas with little satisfactory resolution. Everyone else I met in the dining area or the learning room where various lectures were held by professors onboard the ship.

Okorafor binti