When a Walangila chief died, his family put his head in a clay pot and
waited for the snake. The boy is seven. The snake has been feeding for
ninety-one years. He is almost old enough to be told.
On a green ridge above Bukoba, on the western shore of Lake Victoria,
a grandmother raises her grandson on a single word — Walangilaki: what
could they do to me. Through four visits to the forbidden house with
the cone-shaped roof, through the first winter, through the burial that
changes everything, the boy learns what his family keeps, and what it
costs to keep it.
Book One of the SILT trilogy. A novel about the inheritance of how to
be unmoved — in the lineage of Achebe, Adichie, and Ishiguro.
