We come to lie with Ezeulu and his people as complex, intelligent individuals, or so cartridge clips wise, sometimes foolish, sometimes t abateer, sometimes vicious---in short, as fully hu part beings. Achebe all the way wants us to travel through the life, mind, heart and soul of Ezeulu in recite to appreciate this great leader and vital man. The author does and so impress the reader with the unique and wondrous character of the Chief Priest of the god Ulu and his people.
This consciousness of the special human beings in the tribe is meant to collide period-on with the prejudice of the whites who are nerve-wracking to control the Africans whom they do non understand. For example, Captain Winterbottom receives a roll from an officer who, though paternalistic toward the Africans, at least shows some appreciation for their culture and beliefs, as much as he might be recommending manipulation of that culture and those beliefs for the white man's purposes. In his response to this memo, Winterbottom typifies the worst of the white man in his hero-worship and hatred of the African people:
Words, words, words. Civilization, African mind, African atmosphere. Has His watch ever rescued a man buried up to his neck, with a piece of roast yam on his head to attract vultures? . . . Why couldn't some iodin tell the bloody man that the whole damn thing was stupid and futile (Achebe 57).
ng as well that Winterbottom uses the encounter of the yam as a symbol of what he sees as the animalistic brutality of the African tribe, for the yam is the centerpiece of one of the two crucial rituals which tie the people to the land and to their gods. Ezeulu is the superintendent of both of those rituals, which express in complex religious toll and ceremonies the knowledge and wisdom of the people.
When Winterbottom reduces the yam to the level of bait for vultures in a cruel game of torture, he shows the disdain and lose of understanding which the whites have for the Africans, their lives, and their culture.
There is impending tragedy in the book, for we know from our historical perspective that the coming of the white man would throw the traditional African culture and society into turmoil, a transformation which was only just beginning at the time this novel takes place. But there is also a reason that somehow there would be found a proportionality in which the gods or God dealt out just rewards for item actions. For example, "The sudden collapse of Captain Winterbottom on the very twenty-four hour period he sent policemen to arrest the Chief Priest of Umuaro was clearly quite significant" (Achebe 154). Indeed, the "coincidence" shows that there is a reason at work which is at least for the moment more than a match for the power which the white man believes he has over the African.
Alas, that power seems to be broken by the end of the book, with Winterbottom back in control, Christianity supplanting traditional African religion, and Ezeulu no longer in power. In fact, he appears to have muzzy his mind in thorough defeat and humiliation, abandoned not only by his people but also by his god.
When they
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