Community, Friendship, and Belonging Theme Analysis

As teenage Binti details her friends’ and family’s less-than-ideal reactions to her acceptance to Oomza University in the weeks before she secretly leaves home to attend the school, it becomes clear that Binti doesn’t feel she belongs at home quite as much as she originally thought she did. By leaving home, Binti is able to discover that belonging isn’t as simple as staying home and following her family’s wishes for her future. Rather, Binti realizes that she can create a sense of belonging for herself anywhere by making friends who share her interests and support her endeavors.

Binti is intimately connected to her home—that is, the land she calls home and the Himba culture she was born into. She’s extremely proud of her father, who makes prized astrolabes (communication devices that hold a person’s history and future) and finds meaning and solace in her culture’s hygiene and beauty practice of covering one’s body and hair with otjize paste, which is reddish brown and helps a user stay clean without regular access to water for bathing. However strong her cultural connections are, though, Binti nevertheless begins to feel like an outsider when she learns of her acceptance to Oomza Uni, a prestigious school across the galaxy where no Himba has ever been accepted. Disappointingly, Binti’s family and close friends react poorly to her acceptance. It’s not common or even culturally acceptable for Himba to leave their lands, so it’s unthinkable that Binti would choose to do so in pursuit of a higher education—especially when, by all accounts, she’s gifted and poised to take over her father’s astrolabe workshop in the future. Especially given that even Binti’s best friend Dele laughs at her when she shares the news of her acceptance, the novel implies that it’s impossible to maintain strong connections when one’s friends and family aren’t supportive. In some regards, Binti implies that while the relationships one forms through cultural connections are extremely important, they cannot be the only thing driving a friendship—friends must support one another’s dreams and desires, even when those conflict with their culture.

Indeed, though Binti’s journey to the spaceship that will take her to Oomza Uni and her first day onboard are peppered with incidences of racism and prejudice, she nevertheless makes a number of close friends very quickly, once she and her future classmates are able to bond over their shared loves of math and science. Through these budding friendships, Binti is able to start to conceptualize what life is going to be like at Oomza Uni. She can see that while she won’t necessarily be able to easily fix her issues with her family at home, she’ll nevertheless be part of a thriving academic community where all people—no matter what they look like or where they come from—are respected for their academic achievements and supported as they work toward those achievements. In other words, the friendship Binti knows she’s going to make at Oomza Uni are clearly going to be stronger and more meaningful for her (at least during her time at school) than those she left behind. Despite not sharing cultural roots, Binti and her classmates will still be able to bond over their mutual interest in mathematical equations, scientific discoveries, and new technologies.

Following the Meduse’s hijacking of the ship (during which they murder everyone but Binti and the pilot), Binti begins to understand that it’s also possible to form friendships based on genuine respect for individuals’ cultures and their academic pursuits; friendship doesn’t have to be based on just one or the other. Over the few days that Binti is on the ship with the Meduse, she forms a fragile friendship with a young Meduse named Okwu. Through their interactions, Binti comes to see that Okwu is a lot like her: young, headstrong, and independent. Binti learns about the Meduse and comes to respect how honorable they are, while Okwu immediately latches onto the newly discovered healing powers of Binti’s otjize—a symbolic respect for Binti’s entire culture. Their friendship, in this sense, begins as they gain an appreciation for the other’s very different culture; it grows and matures as they spend more time together as fellow students at Oomza Uni.

In the brief descriptions of Binti and Okwu’s first few months at Oomza Uni, Okorafor makes the case that especially because both individuals come from such wildly different cultural backgrounds—and backgrounds that are so different from any of their other classmates—they’re able to find a sense of camaraderie with each other that is harder to form with other individuals at school. And most importantly, it’s Okwu who ultimately pushes Binti to reach out to and reconnect with her family. Through this, Binti positions friendship as both a powerful force that can help a person feel at home in a new environment and as a supportive link between a person’s culture and family and their future.