his fifth head and he was not an old man yet. On great occasions such as the funeral of a
village celebrity he drank his palm-wine from his first human head.
In the morning the market place was full. There must have been about ten
thousand men there, all talking in low voices. At last Ogbuefi Ezeugo stood up in the
midst of them and bellowed four times, "Umuofia kwenu," and on each occasion he
faced a different direction and seemed to push the air with a clenched fist. And ten
thousand men answered "Yaa!" each time. Then there was perfect silence. Ogbuefi
Ezeugo was a powerful orator and was always chosen to speak on such occasions. He
moved his hand over his white head and stroked his white beard. He then adjusted his
cloth, which was passed under his right arm-pit and tied above his left shoulder.
"Umuofia kwenu," he bellowed a fifth time, and the crowd yelled in answer.
And then suddenly like one possessed he shot out his left hand and pointed in the
direction of Mbaino, and said through gleaming white teeth firmly clenched: "Those
sons of wild animals have dared to murder a daughter of Umuofia." He threw his head
down and gnashed his teeth, and allowed a murmur of suppressed anger to sweep the
crowd. When he began again, the anger on his face was gone, and in its place a sort of
smile hovered, more terrible and more sinister than the anger. And in a clear
unemotional voice he told Umuofia how their daughter had gone to market at Mbaino
and had been killed. That woman, said Ezeugo, was the wife of Ogbuefi Udo, and he
pointed to a man who sat near him with a bowed head. The crowd then shouted with
ainger and thirst for blood.
Many others spoke, and at the end it was decided to follow the normal course of
action. An ultimatum was immediately dispatched to Mbaino asking them to choose
between war - on the one hand, and on the other the offer of a young man and a virgin
as compensation.
Umuofia was feared by all its neighbours. It was powerful in war and in magic,
and its priests and medicine men were feared in all the surrounding country. Its most
potent war-medicine was as old as the clan itself. Nobody knew how old. But on one
point there was general agreement--the active principle in that medicine had been an old
woman with one leg. In fact, the medicine itself was called agadi-nwayi, or old woman.