Igbo Culture

European colonization of Africa was thought to be an expedition to make the native people cultured and civilized, and yet their story is often left untold. Even when the invading people’s intentions are good, the chaos and social destruction they cause can be irreparable to the cultures they infiltrate. Chinua Achebe demonstrates this through the tale of the Ibo culture which must go through drastic changes with the introduction of a strange religion with even stranger people. In his book, Things Fall Apart, Achebe narrates a historical story through the eyes of a fictional character as he watches his community collapse. With the story made into three parts, Achebe takes each section and uses it to build up the Ibo culture then slowly pull

everything apart from within. This book has changed the minds and hearts of people in the Western world who had no prior knowledge of African culture, and were surprised to see it not unlike their own. In the tragic story of a marginalized continent, Chinua Achebe, with a unique 3-part structure, humanizes one culture through its devastating loss.

Achebe’s book, Things Fall Apart, is split into three parts; each part of the book shows a different side of the culture and customs of the Ibo people through the eyes of Okonkwo, the main character. Okonkwo is first characterized to be an angry, ambitious man who wants nothing more than to leave the embarrassing shadow of his late father behind. At first, readers may develop a dislike of Okonkwo because of his harsh words and actions delivered to people like his wives and children, things that very few people in today’s Western society would've even dream of doing or saying. Yet through this quote, “Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo wasn't a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness.” (Achebe 13), the reader is drawn into Okonkwo’s faults and is able to relate to him. In this way, Achebe begins to humanize the foreign Ibo culture. As Part 1 continues, Achebe describes in detail the various customs and events that characterize the Ibo culture and more specifically, the clan of Umuofia where the book takes place. Stories are told and events are described, all while making Umuofia a more relatable but seemingly far away place. For example,

throughout the book there were specific examples of what the Ibo culture values, like the Festival of the New Yam and a marriage ritual.

Achebe also wrote Umuofia to have an entire week of peace, described as “‘...we should observe a week in which a man does not say a harsh word to his neighbor. We live in peace with our fellows to honor our great goddess of the earth...’” (Achebe 30). Through this week of peace, a Western reader’s mindset of the early people of Africa being part of a warring, uncivilized culture is changed and one may realize that this is a forward thinking peace that does not exist in most modern day societies. The peaceful side of the Ibo culture is shown, even if Okonkwo and Umuofia are known throughout the book as being harsh and battle loving. Even with all this evidence of the Ibo culture being similar or complementary to the culture of a Western society today, Achebe acknowledges that all cultures have their faults. Although the point is to show the good aspects of an African group that very few people realize, the Ibo culture is not sugarcoated to appease the reader. Many times there are customs and cultural norms that the characters think to be perfectly normal and humane, but one in modern day would consider them to be savage and cruel.

However, Achebe does not make his characters all blind to this fact. In the end of Part 1, Okonkwo’s friend, Obierika, is faced with a moral dilemma after Okonkwo is exiled from Umuofia for accidentally killing a young man. Obierika understood that the clan’s course of action is what’s best for the rest of the people, yet doesn’t quite know why. He thought, “Why should a man suffer so grievously for an offense he had committed inadvertently?” (Achebe 125). However, Obierika came to the conclusion, one that many people eventually do when faced with a similar problem, that the customs of his culture were correct and in society’s best interests. He shows this by thinking, “As the elders said, if one finger brought oil it soiled the others” (Achebe 125). This sort of thinking is displayed throughout the entirety of Part 1 of Things Fall Apart. Achebe weaves an intricate telling of the many foreign customs of the Ibo people and brings light to those that reflect the culture of modern day Western readers, while also not forgetting the fact that no one culture is perfect and each have faults. Doing so humanizes an African culture that so many people think they could never relate to on any level.