Chinua Achebe
Achebe's third and most ambitious novel takes us back to the setting of his first novel "Things Fall Apart". Eweulu, the chief priest of Ulu, the god of the villages, is totally against a war that is brewing between his people Umuaro and a neighboring people.
He respects the white man's power and sends his son to a missionary school so that he may know the secret of the white man's power.
His son, with the zeal of a new Christian convert, shuts a sacred python in a box in order to kill it. This attempt to kill a sacred snake does not improve relations between Ezeulu and his enemies who already suspect that he has become the white man's friend.
Another incident that lowers his public esteem is his detention by the white regional authority. In detention, he is offered the chieftainship, which he declines.
This enforced stay away from home has meant that Ezeulu has missed eating two of the thirteen yams he had to consume, one at each new moon, before the new yam festival at the end of the year.
Chinua Achebe's book is intended to give the intelligent reader a map of themes and styles of African writing in the verse, prose, and proverbs.
African writers, whether they use metropolitan or indigenous language, have assimilated many of the mannerisms and assumptions of their particular medium; to say nothing of social, economic and political systems of the West which the Africans have absorbed.
Chinua Achebe's books available at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Chinua-Achebe/e/B0045671ES