adaptation
... absorbing it. When the villagers eat the locusts the proteins in the insects’ nurture them. It is good for their body. The white man is good for the village in a way that they nurture them with the opportunity to advance, to progress. Because many of the villagers were unhappy with their lives such as the main character Okonkwo’s son, Nwoye, the new religion brought them hope for a new and better life; it brought them a life with options and gave them choices. With good must always come with a bad however, and like the locusts, the white man has a hidden agenda. The locusts are seen as good to eat, but with that comes their agenda of inevitably drastic and somewhat destructive change to the landscape and agriculture. Achebe changes his tone in the latter part of the paragraph to illustrate the might in which the white man (locusts) comes: And at last the locusts did descend. They settled on every tree and on every blade of grass; they settled on roofs and covered the bare ground. Mighty tree branches broke away under then, and the whole country became the brown-earth color of the vast, hungry swarm. (56) “At last the locusts did descend,” refers to the seemingly harmless hovering over and observing the white man seems to do before they “settled on every tree,” and “covered the bare ground.” Achebe uses words such as “mighty tree branches broke away under them,” which shows that the white man is much stronger than the resistance of the village because they are smarter and more advanced than the clansmen. They do not come and attack, but cautiously scans the land and culture before sending more to come. Achebe illustrates their intelligence and wit while referring to the locusts as them in the following: At first, a fairly small swarm came. They were the harbingers sent to survey the land. And the appeared on the horizon a slowly moving mass like a boundless sheet of black cloud drifting towards Umuofia. (56) Like the locusts, the slow incoming of the missionaries is at first small so as not to pose a threat, but eventually grow into “a boundless sheet of black sky.” Achebe uses the locusts to foreshadow the coming of the white man by using words such as “At first, a fairly small swarm came. They were the harbingers sent to survey the land.” This correlates to later passages where Achebe uses very similar language while describing the coming of one missionary. He wrote, “They were locusts, it said, and the first man was their harbinger sent to explore the terrain. And so they killed him” (138). This relation shows that Achebe wants the reader to find a direct relation between the locusts and the white man. The locusts do not only refer to the white man however, but Achebe also uses them to represent the clan itself. Achebe writes, “Soon it covered half the sky, and the solid mass was now broken by the tiny eyes of light like shining star dust. It was tremendous sight, full of power and beauty” (56). The solid mass represent...