The belief in African inferiority has existed since at least the 16th century. The 17th and 18th centuries saw European scientists going to great lengths to find scientific evidence of the inferiority of Africans, even the theory that Africans were the descendants of apes who raped white women was accepted during the 17th century. Europeans used their belief that Africans were primitive, cultureless subhuman beings to justify the enslavement of what UNESCO estimates were 25 to 30 million Africans in the late 17th and early 19th centuries. century. With the exception of Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, slavery in the Western world had been abolished by 1870, but the belief in African inferiority continued throughout Europe and the United States. Previously Europeans had been unable to penetrate the interior of the African continent due to dangerous conditions and disease, particularly malaria, however by the 1870s, advances in European technology brought about by the Industrial Revolution allowed Europeans not only to progress further into Africa, but it also gave them a hunger for African raw materials. To justify the conquest of Africa, Europeans advanced the theory that Africans were primitive in key fields of behavior, social order, economic structure, and religion. In 1958, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart, in which he provides a fictional account of an Ibo man named Okonkwo and his life in the village of Umofia and the surrounding region. Achebe's description of the Ibo culture, however, is very real and challenges the beliefs that Europeans had about Africans and their culture. European powers entered Africa with the belief that Africans were naturally violent and bestial people, yet things fall... middle of paper ......t Africans are uncultured or unintelligent. Even today, African culture does not enjoy the same type of respect reserved for cultures in other parts of the world; this may be due to a lack of understanding on the part of Westerners. The title of the district commissioner's book “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger” sums up the lack of interest in truly understanding African culture. In a world where Western culture dominates, Africa remains a place where many people refuse to separate from their traditions, they may adopt some characteristics of other cultures, but they never separate from who they are. Achebe demonstrates that cultures in Africa deserve to be protected, studied, and understood.