Chinua Achebes Africa Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Chinua Achebes Africa - Essay Example They live almost entirely on yams, which are considered a man’s crop, but they also ate things that the women grew such as fruits and vegetables. The people in the village are very much like people everywhere else - there are many who work very hard and are respected and there are others, like Okonkwo's father Unoka who would rather spend their time entertaining others. But the common practice of the tribes was to indiscriminately cut down the virgin forests and exploit the resources of the land in the same way that the white man wanted to exploit the resources of the land. In this way, they aren't really that much different than the white men who come in toward the end of the book. It seems like that is the major message Achebe was trying to get across about the people in his book - that whether they were black or white, they were all the same underneath. Just like the white men, the black men of the village work and struggle to eke out a survival in a harsh land. It is becau se the land is so difficult instead of any lack of personal development that forces the society to base social status on each man's success as a farmer. Unoka is proof that a friendlier land that didn't make it so difficult to grow things would have led to a more artistically developed society.