Four Africas, Four Americas

The four sisters represent vastly different American perspectives in relation to race and Africa. This helps to create a book with balanced representations of ideas, aiding in Kingsolver's fulfillment of her purpose.

Rachel is the American stereotype, condensed into one person. She is materialistic, selfish, racist, and flighty, with few moments of empathy or real emotion and pain. The rawness of Africa's climate and culture, and the way that everyone suffers without realizing how little they have, forces Rachel into a state of even more severe self-absorption. Having to go without so many comforts makes her retreat into herself, craving the American culture that she knows and isolating herself from her family and her surroundings. When she leaves Kilanga, her eventual development leads to further isolation, in a hotel where she has complete control and where she doesn't have to leave the safety of her constructed home.

Adah transitions from the cynical and bitter critic to a fairly unbiased and judicial observer. She is furious with her lot in the world and critical of all around her, especially people. Like Rachel, she feels an interest only in herself (a prime American value), and she expresses it in her refusal to communicate with anyone. However, throughout the entire book she has a passion for knowledge, especially scientific and anthropological knowledge. She is the unprejudiced view of Africa and the United States, comparing and contrasting them as little more than biological battlegrounds for life.
She sees people, both African and American, as the same as animals and plants; all just trying to survive in the most effective way.

Leah is the anger of the story; she shows the larger social context within which the plot operates. First this is the perspective of religion and missionary work. She questions her faith and the authority of the religion that she has absorbed into her, and she struggles against ideas of what she can and cannot do based on gender and race. Leah is the American protester, furious at the world for its injustice and unable to effectively change anything. She challenges what she learned as a child: marrying Anatole's, having children but staying politically active, not having a stationary home, going against the government and her religion. Leah feels that she can never leave Africa, both because it has become a second home and because, no matter how out of place she may feel in the Congo, she feels that America will never welcome her again because of her rebellions.

Ruth May represents the innocent humanity which connects people of different cultures and hold families together. She has an easier time than any of the other sisters at making friends with the people of Kilanga, and she holds no true discrimination. She has been fed racist ideologies by her parents and American society, but her actions betray no racism, only curiosity and innocence. In this way, she shows the honesty and simplicity of the mind which has not been touched by western racist and religious influence, but which expresses the human excitement at family and at connection with new people. When she dies, her family loses the ties that they have to each other to a certain extent, and all except Leah lose their closeness to Africa and their passion for change.