Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart
“Tradition is the illusion of permanence”-Woody Allen. The quote by Allen is sometimes interpreted as that things change, and as humans we hate change, so we have tradition as a way to preserve it, even though eventually it will disappear eventually. In Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, the main character Okonkwo faces a similar dilemma as foreigners bring new beliefs that entice his own clansmen and many of them abandon their old beliefs. Tradition has many benefits, such as having a cultural identity and to pass down values from generation to generation. Some drawbacks are that if faced with a culture that is perceived to be superior, it ruins the legitimacy of the tradition. Okonkwo lived in a village called Umuofia that prioritizes
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They expected them to die within four days, but to their surprise they seem to be perfectly alive. Soon after the missionaries won their first converts. Some converts even boasted that all the gods they worshipped are false and readied themselves to burn all their shrines. Mr Kiaga, the missionaries’ interpreter, demanded that before he admits them to the church they must shave their hair. He said to them, “Unless you shave off the mark of your heathen belief I will not admit you into the church. You fear that you will die”(Achebe 157). Soon after doing so, the men became the most faithful followers of the new faith. Then all the osu, or outcasts, soon follow their example and then followed by other seen as undesirables. Soon some became so zealot that one of them killed the royal python, who in Mbanta and the surrounding clans was the most revered animal. One of the converts is directly close to Okonkwo himself; his son Nwoye. Even before the missionaries Nwoye was questioning the ways of the clan. After his father had killed Ikemefuna, a person who was given to Okonkwo for a crime his father had committed, has formed close bonds with the family, he felt begins to wonder the clan’s tradition of seeing twins as abominations as he “heard that twins were put in earthenware pots and thrown away in the forest…”(Achebe 62). He hears that the foreigners don’t do that he is enticed by its teachings and eventually converts and convinces his other family members to
They expected them to die within four days, but to their surprise they seem to be perfectly alive. Soon after the missionaries won their first converts. Some converts even boasted that all the gods they worshipped are false and readied themselves to burn all their shrines. Mr Kiaga, the missionaries’ interpreter, demanded that before he admits them to the church they must shave their hair. He said to them, “Unless you shave off the mark of your heathen belief I will not admit you into the church. You fear that you will die”(Achebe 157). Soon after doing so, the men became the most faithful followers of the new faith. Then all the osu, or outcasts, soon follow their example and then followed by other seen as undesirables. Soon some became so zealot that one of them killed the royal python, who in Mbanta and the surrounding clans was the most revered animal. One of the converts is directly close to Okonkwo himself; his son Nwoye. Even before the missionaries Nwoye was questioning the ways of the clan. After his father had killed Ikemefuna, a person who was given to Okonkwo for a crime his father had committed, has formed close bonds with the family, he felt begins to wonder the clan’s tradition of seeing twins as abominations as he “heard that twins were put in earthenware pots and thrown away in the forest…”(Achebe 62). He hears that the foreigners don’t do that he is enticed by its teachings and eventually converts and convinces his other family members to