“Mama, what…”

“The sun was high in the sky,” she said in her soft voice. “It lit everything. That’s when they came. When most of the women, those of us older than fifteen, were Holding Conversation in the desert. I was about twenty years old…”

The Nuru militants waited for the retreat, when the Okeke women walked into the desert and stayed for seven days to give respect to the goddess Ani. “Okeke” means “the created ones.” The Okeke people have skin the color of the night because they were created before the day. They were the first. Later, after much had happened, the Nuru arrived. They came from the stars and that’s why their skin is the color of the sun.

These names must have been agreed upon during peaceful times, for it was well known that the Okeke were born to be slaves of the Nuru. Long ago, during the Old Africa Era, they had done something terrible causing Ani to put this duty on their backs. It is written in the Great Book.

Though Najeeba lived with her husband in a small Okeke village where no one was a slave, she knew her place. Like everyone else in her village, if she lived in the Seven Rivers Kingdom, only fifteen miles east, where there was more to be had, she would spend her life serving the Nuru.

Most abided by the old saying, “A snake is foolish if it dreams of being a lizard.” But one day, thirty years earlier, a group of Okeke men and women in the city of Zin rejected it. They’d had enough. They rose up rioting and demanding and refusing. Their passion spread to neighboring Seven Rivers towns and villages. These Okeke paid dearly for having ambition. Everyone did, as is always the case with genocide. On and off this had been happening since. Those rebelling Okekes that weren’t exterminated were driven East.