Things Falls Apart

Colonialism is when a country sends its people to go live and build in a new land to claim it for that country. The Igbo were a group of people who lived in the country of Nigeria before the Europeans came to make Africa their own. Things Falls Apart, by Chinua Achebe, is set in the Igbo village of Umuofia. When white Europeans come to their land and claim it for themselves, their ways of life change drastically. When the Europeans arrived, they brought their own religion that some of the Igbo converted to, and they made the feared Igbo warriors no longer want to go to war.
In the beginning, the people of Umuofia were strong warriors who were feared by the villages that neighbored them because of their prowess in battle. “And so the neighboring clans who naturally knew of these things feared Umuofia, and would not go to war against it without first trying a peaceful settlement” (12). The other villages that neighbored Umuofia feared their strength because they were

“The missionaries had come to Umuofia. They had built their church there, won a handful of converts and were already sending evangelists to the surrounding towns and villages” (143). When the Europeans arrived, they spoke of their own religion and convinced some Igbo to convert to their religion. In the end, Umuofia was no longer the strong and warlike village that it had been. “He knew that Umuofia would not go to war. He knew because they had let the other messengers escape. They had broken into tumult instead of action. He discerned fright in that tumult. He heard voices asking: ‘Why did he do it?’” (205). When Okonkwo killed a messenger who told the people of Umuofia to stop their meeting about whether or not they should go to war against the white men, the people of Umuofia did not help him, not wishing to go to war to protect their way of