Howls in the Night : I SAW THE SKY CATCH FIRE, <i> By T. Obinkaram Echewa (Dutton: $20; 336 pp.)</i>

South African writer Peter Abrahams, friend to first presidents Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, once wrote, “Tribal man is hemmed in, imprisoned by his ancestors. His horizons are only as wide as they permit.”

Ajuzia, the young protagonist of T. Obinkaram Echewa’s new novel, “I Saw the Sky Catch Fire,” has the impulse to howl into the night sky, as his grandfather had done, to “make a mark in this big void.” He wants to explore the universe outside his native Nigeria, and, indeed, has won a scholarship to a university in far-off Philadelphia.

The night before he is set to leave, his grandmother, Nne-nne, captures him for one last, long talk. It goes on most of the night, and it’s not much of a dialogue. In a mesmerizing, impassioned soliloquy, this woman of few words conjures up past events, real and apocryphal, to educate Ajuzia about war. Not men’s war, but women’s war--both the eternal war against male injustice, and the brief and bloody Women’s War of 1929 against British colonial rule in which Nne-nne played a role.

At the heart of Nne-nne’s discourse is the concept of Ndom, the universal solidarity of women. Ndom sustains and empowers Nigerian women, and it alone made it possible for the women of eastern and coastal Nigeria to rise up against the British tax stranglehold, while the men sat back and watched.

Nne-nne’s monologue, which fills Part One, is a litany of men’s treachery and inadequacy. “When the White Man came and took over our land, what did the men do?” Nne-nne asks Ajuzia. “They fought here and there, heaved high and ho with threats of what they were getting ready to do, held long talks under the big trees and in the end handed over the land and all of us to him.”

Even dutiful Ajuzia chafes under this man-bashing onslaught. “Right now I was feeling a tinge of loyalty for my gender,” he admits at one point. Then he realizes the criticism is aimed closer to home. “If Nne-nne was saying that men were truant to their duties, then I was clearly being truant to my duty by leaving her as custodian of my ancestral compound.” She is, in fact, quite proud that her grandson, “son of my son, is flying in an aeroplane to White Man’s country. Who says I am not lucky?” But she does want him to understand that she is temporarily taking charge. It will be his responsibility, and his children’s after him, to keep those home fires burning.

Ndom embodies a kind of female wisdom of how things should be--something Ajuzia finally understands and appreciates in Part Two, as he confronts his own women’s war upon his return home after a protracted five years to find Nne-nne on her deathbed and the young wife he had left behind now pregnant by another man. Will he divorce Stella, as is his right? Will he leave his compound untended to complete his Ph.D. exams back in Philadelphia? Will he let his ancestors set his horizons for him?

“I Saw the Sky Catch Fire” has its problems: peripatetic pacing, sudden switches of voice that have you thumbing backward to see where you got lost, a certain deadening repetitiousness in parts, particularly the climax.

Despite these flaws, though, it is a magical, original book. Echewa, an award-winning Nigerian author who lives in Philadelphia, is a master of dialogue, and truly gifted in his evocation of character. Nne-nne’s tale-spinning is half words, half chant, and the text is energized by liberal sprinklings of colorful and often bawdy Nigerian songs, proverbs, invocations and exhortations.

Echewa may have intended his novel to be a portrait of one young man coming to terms with, as Ajuzia puts it, “abandoning our collective past for what I thought was my inevitable personal future.” What he ended up with is a remarkable piece of feminist literature. The women he portrays are extraordinary, not just Nne-nne herself and Stella but the women of Nne-nne’s tales: Ahunze, the widow hacked to death for the twin crimes of not remarrying and becoming instead a successful tradeswoman; the Englishwoman Elizabeth Ashby-Jones, there to study Nigerian women’s tribal life, but abducted during the Women’s War and guarded by, among others, Nne-nne; the prostitute Oyoyo Love, dragged by the village women back home and given a clitorectomy to correct her aberrant behavior (Ndom, indeed).

So clearly and empathetically does the author evoke these fine, mostly tragic, creatures that you wonder if Echewa had his own Nne-nne who filled his head before he left for far-off Philadelphia. If so, ala hentu , as Nne-nne might say--let there be earthquakes. This is cultural history we all should know and appreciate.