Village of the Damned?

[LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU]

For a *real* African'
s perspective on this village/individual issue, see Chinua Achebe's 
THINGS FALL APART.  Okonkwo, the protagonist, is a self-made man and
rugged individualist in a community that is strongly woven together by
beliefs, customs and rituals.  He rises to the top, only to have fate
throw him down several times.  But his individualism is extreme and helps
to lead to his own problems.  The village is presented as having an
environment that works for the good of the whole, but it also has practices
and beliefs that are not always what we would regard as positive.

Achebe does a nice job of playing off these different sets of values and
then showing how what might have become a natural evolution of that society
was completely and irrevocably disrupted by the instrusion of white colonists.
He does a good job of trying to avoid those binarisms!

Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)