the land. The crime was of two kinds, male and female. Okonkwo had committed the
female, because it had been inadvertent. He could return to the clan after seven years.
That night he collected his most valuable belongings into head-loads. His wives
wept bitterly and their children wept with them without knowing why. Obierika and half
a dozen other friends came to help and to console him. They each made nine or ten trips
carrying Okonkwo's yams to store in Obierika's barn. And before the cock crowed
Okonkwo and his family were fleeing to his motherland. It was a little village called
Mbanta, just beyond the borders of Mbaino.
As soon as the day broke, a large crowd of men from Ezeudu's quarter stormed
Okonkwo's compound, dressed in garbs of war. They set fire to his houses, demolished
his red walls, killed his animals and destroyed his barn. It was the justice of the earth
goddess, and they were merely her messengers. They had no hatred in their hearts
against Okonkwo. His greatest friend, Obierika, was among them. They were merely
cleansing the land which Okonkwo had polluted with the blood of a clansman.
Obierika was a man who thought about things. When the will of the goddess had
been done, he sat down in his obi and mourned his friend's calamity. Why should a man
suffer so grievously for an offence he had committed inadvertently? But although he
thought for a long time he found no answer. He was merely led into greater
complexities. He remembered his wife's twin children, whom he had thrown away.
What crime had they committed? The Earth had decreed that they were an offence on
the land and must be destroyed. And if the clan did not exact punishment for an offence
against the great goddess, her wrath was loosed on all the land and not just on the
offender. As the elders said, if one finger brought oil it soiled the others.