Wild Seed Study Guide

Anyanwu

Anyanwu is the Wild Seed’s black female protagonist that is born in Africa with genetic mutations that endow her with immortality and physical strength. She also possesses a preternatural ability to heal the sick and injured, including herself. Anyanwu is a “shape-shifter,” someone who is capable of altering her cells to create a new identity such as a different body, sex, age, or even species− metamorphoses she calls upon when needed to assure her survival. Although she has the ability to do harm, Anyanwu is a highly moral woman with a strong sense of humanity. Important to Anyanwu are family and community,autonomy and companionship, love and freedom, all of which are threatened when she meets Doro.

Doro

Doro is the story’s antagonist. He too is a mutant, born in Egypt during the reign of the Pharaohs. As he approaches puberty, Doro learns quite accidentally that he is a “body snatcher,” meaning that his life extended by killing the nearest person to him and subsuming his/her physical body. His immortality, therefore, is fueled by cruelty, and a desire for power and control. Long ago he became singularly fixated on breeding superhumans to form a psionic society that will provide him with the human bodies he needs, as well as sexual partners. Doro’s qualities are god-like, inducing members of his society to simultaneously fear and revere him. However, there is no one on earth that can satisfy his need for companionship, until he meets Anyanwu.

Isaac

Isaac is Doro’s favorite son. Isaac is physically human in all respects, but possesses an unmatchable telekinetic ability that Doro foremost desires for his constructed society. Doro successfully schemes to mate his son Isaac with his wife Anyanwu as the progenitors of a new lineage of superhumans. The near-incestuous couple form a loving and enduring bond and raise a family together.

Thomas

Thomas is a sickly, drunken, angry, sullen psionic who lives a hermit’s life in the woods. Doro orders Anyanwu to breed with him to teach her a lesson about obedience, as well as to produce a highly gifted child.

Nweke

Ruth Nweke is Anyanwu and Thomas’s daughter, and is raised in the household of Anyanwu and Isaac. Nweke is a promising psionic whose powers are so sensitive that they pose a danger. The outcome of her intense transition into psionic adulthood is a setback for Doro’s eugenics program.

Stephen

Stephen Ifeyinwa is Anyanwu’s son who lives with her in the South on a plantation. She adores him; he is not a product of Doro’s breeding program.

Minor Characters

• Okoye is Anyanwu’s grandson whom she meets in an African slave port.Udenkwo is Anyanwu’s distant relative. She marries Okoye.
• Bernard Daly is Doro’s right-hand man in the slave business.

  John Woodley is Doro’s ordinary son and captain of the slave ship.

• Lale Sachs is Doro’s “wild” psionic son whom Anyanwu kills in self-defense.
• Joseph Toler is a malicious agent planted by Doro in Anyanwu’s Louisiana plantation.
• Helen Obiageli and Margaret Nneka are Anyanwu’s daughters in Louisiana.
• Iye is Stephen Ifeyinwa’s wife.
• Luisa is an elderly woman working for Anyanwu’s family on the plantation, Rita is a cook, and Susan is a field hand.