Pictures of human life
Although the title suggests that the national story of Nigeria will be the main focus of the novel, the novelist offers his own life's story as a way of familiarizing the reader with Nigerian life. Perhaps by meeting one real human, we can anchor ourselves in the story in a more meaningful way. Perhaps the author does this because he suspects that people have silent prejudices against Africa, or that they believe widely held misinformation about Africa.
This imagery includes a depiction of Achebe as a young man, describing the fashion of the times, the look of the community and its various buildings, a depiction of the university and the program he wants to study, the purchase of a home, the formation of a career in writing, and the rise to success. In other words, the reader is challenged to remember that Africans are real people. Then he tells the story of their civil war.
Images of tribal life and division
Nigerian life is tribal in this story, a strange element to many readers, since African tribes are a matter of family, ethnicity, whereas Western people tend to differentiate people based on their ethnicity on a more broad level (as in "Italian"). But certainly, anyone can understand the frustrations of restoring political divisions during difficult economic times. The main depiction of a tribe being mistreated occurs when the Igbo people are marginalized and mistreated across Nigeria, except in the East where they are the majority. This tribal mistreatment is what leads to the secession and civil war.
Images of warfare
This novel contains many pictures of political strife, violent anger, and ultimately, warfare. First, it seems like tribal warfare, but because the Republic of Biafra was committed to fighting for the fair treatment of the Igbo people in Nigeria, they simply would not stop until they were forced into submission after three years of brutal war.
The land of Nigeria
It would be hard to talk about Nigeria and not mention the strange beauty of its local landscape. The backdrop to the Nigerian Civil War is Nigeria itself, the beautiful lands. The beauty of the land also serves as a foil to the grotesque, unnecessary horrors of the war. The story has an epic flavor, since the human warfare leads to many unnecessary deaths, but in the end, the land itself is unscathed. Landscape imagery often has this effect in wartime stories.
