CHAPTER SEVEN
For three years Ikemefuna lived in Okonkwo's household and the elders of Umuofia
seemed to have forgotten about him. He grew rapidly like a yam tendril in the rainy
season, and was full of the sap of life. He had become wholly absorbed into his new
family. He was like an elder brother to Nwoye, and from the very first seemed to have
kindled a new fire in the younger boy. He made him feel grown-up, and they no longer
spent the evenings in his mother's hut while she cooked, but now sat with Okonkwo in
his obi, or watched him as he tapped his palm tree for the evening wine. Nothing
pleased Nwoye now more than to be sent for by his mother or another of his father's
wives to do one of those difficult and masculine tasks in the home, like splitting wood,
or pounding food. On receiving such a message through a younger brother or sister,
Nwoye would feign annoyance and grumble aloud about women and their troubles.
Okonkwo was inwardly pleased at his son's development, and he knew it was
due to Ikemefuna. He wanted Nwoye to grow into a tough young man capable of ruling
his father's household when he was dead and gone to join the ancestors.
He wanted him to be a prosperous man, having enough in his barn to feed the
ancestors with regular sacrifices. And so he was always happy when he heard him
grumbling about women. That showed that in time he would be able to control his
women-folk. No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women
and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man. He was like the
man in the song who had ten and one wives and not enough soup for his foo-foo.
So Okonkwo encouraged the boys to sit with him in his obi, and he told them
stories of the land--masculine stories of violence and bloodshed. Nwoye knew that it
was right to be masculine and to be violent, but somehow he still preferred the stories
that his mother used to tell, and which she no doubt still told to her younger children-stories of the tortoise and his wily ways, and of the bird eneke-nti-oba who challenged
the whole world to a wrestling contest and was finally thrown by the cat. He
remembered the story she often told of the quarrel between Earth and Sky long ago, and