began to own a farm at your age. And you," he said to Ikemefuna, "do you not grow
yams where you come from?"
Inwardly Okonkwo knew that the boys were still too young to understand fully
the difficult art of preparing seed-yams. But he thought that one could not begin too
early. Yam stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family on yams from one
harvest to another was a very great man indeed. Okonkwo wanted his son to be a great
farmer and a great man. He would stamp out the disquieting signs of laziness which he
thought he already saw in him.
"I will not have a son who cannot hold up his head in the gathering of the clan. I
would sooner strangle him with my own hands. And if you stand staring at me like
that," he swore, "Amadiora will break your head for you!"
Some days later, when the land had been moistened by two or three heavy rains,
Okonkwo and his family went to the farm with baskets of seed-yams, their hoes and
machetes, and the planting began. They made single mounds of earth in straight lines all
over the field and sowed the yams in them.
Yam, the king of crops, was a very exacting king. For three or four moons it
demanded hard work and constant attention from cockcrow till the chickens went back
to roost. The young tendrils were protected from earth-heat with rings of sisal leaves. As
the rains became heavier the women planted maize, melons and beans between the yam
mounds. The yams were then staked, first with little sticks and later with tall and big
tree branches. The women weeded the farm three times at definite periods in the life of
the yams, neither early nor late.
And now the rains had really come, so heavy and persistent that even the village
rain-maker no longer claimed to be able to intervene. He could not stop the rain now,
just as he would not attempt to start it in the heart of the dry season, without serious
danger to his own health. The personal dynamism required to counter the forces of these
extremes of weather would be far too great for the human frame.