Novel concerns the life of Okonkwo, a leader and local wrestling champion throughout the nine, fictional, villages of the Igbo ethnic group of Umuofia in Nigeria, his three wives, his children (mainly concerning his oldest son Nwoye and his favorite daughter Ezinma), and the influences of British colonialism and Christian missionaries on his traditional Igbo (archaically spelled "Ibo") community during an unspecified time in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.