Poor boy Okonkwo grew up to have three wives, eight children and two barns full of yams.
When he was a child, the land grew more than enough cassavas and yams to feed his family.
Through them he surveyed the cultural, social and ethical fallout from the substance he had synthesised so innocently, back in 1951, using diosgenin from wild yams, in the hope it might produce a cure for menstrual trouble.It was the Pill that had unlocked his literary side.
"When it comes to discussing the cost of planting, the men beat the prices down," says Victoria Lucas, a widow of 40 in Taraba, who grows cassava, yams and maize with her six children.
During the strike, they uprooted some of the sugarcane and planted yams, peanuts and assorted vegetables in its stead.
It only recently started distributing free food, and has done little to encourage the substitution of failing local crops such as millet, sorghum and beans with other easily accessible crops such as potatoes and yams.
Polynesians sailed from island to island with pigs, yams and around 30 different plants.
Its Polynesian inhabitants cultivate yams and taro.
It produces primarily root crops (various yams).
Millet, plantains, cassava, and yams are grown, while wheat, cotton, and coffee are raised as cash crops; fish are traded as well.
Bottle gourds, sugarcane, bananas, taro, yams, and two useful trees (i.e., the Asiatic paper mulberry, with bark used for cloth manufacture, and the American Triumfetta semitriloba, with bark used for rope making) were of aboriginal importation, as also probably were the husk-tomato, a small variety of pineapple, and the coconut.
