According to the medicine man in Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Ekwefi's children keep dying because an evil spirit is reincarnating itself in her womb. Ekwefi has given birth to ten children in the past, only one of them survived. The medicine man attributed this to an evil spirit which keeps entering Ekwefi's womb to be born as a baby, it rarely enters three years of age before it died again and re-enter her womb.
