Essay Things Fall Apart

Essay: Things Fall Apart
Vincent Ruelle
English Honors 2nde

Two completely different cultures and ways of life are brought together in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The 1959 novel tells the story of Okonkwo, his village, and his people, The Ibo. The reader learns much about Ibo culture and traditions, but also about British imperialism and how it destroys a unique and irreplaceable way of life. Things Fall Apart recreates the conflict between European and Ibo cultures by focusing on the huge changes introduced by imperialism, colonialism using the vehicle of Christianity. When two cultures confront each other, the stronger, more advanced culture usually imposes itself. There have been numerous examples of this throughout world history: the colonization of Africa and Asia by European empires during the 19th century. One country in particular, India, saw major parts of their unique culture and unique customs thrown away by the British. The British destroyed Indian holy places and gave young Indians a very British education. One can say that the British brought education to India, but they didn’t teach Indians about their own country, instead they taught them about Great Britain as if India’s history was insignificant. The British also constructed railways, telegraph wires, roads, canals and many other things to modernize India. But as a result of British rule, India’a poverty grew because it enriched Great Britain. This proves that when two radically different people confront each other, the more technologically advanced and more developed country ends up imposing itself. In Things Fall Apart, religion is the main reason the Ibo and the European missionaries have such hate for each other. This is evident in Things Fall Apart when Enoch unmasks an egwugwu. Unmasking an egwugwu is equivalent to killing a spirit in the Ibo religion. Because of this, the clansmen burn Enoch’s compound and go burn the church to cleanse the village of Enoch’s horrible sin. Enoch’s alleged killing of the egwugwu spirit symbolizes the transition and the change that is to come. The commissioner obviously comes to the village with soldiers and imprisons the village’s leaders for several days during which they are insulted and abused. The people that stayed in the village are told that they must pay a kind of bail or else their leaders would be hanged. They pay and the leaders are released. All of these unfortunate events are directly caused by religious hate (the unmasking the egwugwu). Religious hate isn’t only between colonizers and tribesmen, there are times when tribesmen don’t appreciate each other because of their religious differences: Okonkwo doesn’t like his son, Nwoye for converting to Christianity, being weak and being “effeminate”. “Now he [the white man] has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.” Obierika says this to Okonkwo at the end of chapter 20 in a disussion that is centered with the change brought to the clan by the colonizers. Obierika is not only blaming the white man for the clan falling apart, he also blames the clansmen that have turned their backs to the clan and their own brothers. By Obierika’s point of view, it is hard to blame only one group of people for the clans’ destruction. The clansmen lacking integrity share with the missionaries the responsibility for the clans’ destruction. These are only fictional examples of two religions being confronted; there are numerous examples of this in history that have had immensely worse consequences. Throughout history and in Thing Fall Apart, religion is the reason people have hated and killed each other.

The strict rules of the Ibo religion didn’t make it an attractive religion for the young people in the clan. The clan’s younger generations are the first to convert to Christianity once the missionaries arrived. It seems as if they found it hard to relate to their native Ibo religion. The younger generations find the Ibo religion to be too harsh and cruel: twins are discarded and are abandoned in the evil forest, and anyone can be exiled for their mistakes. The Ibo also required men to be masculine and violent, but violence was a thing of the past and none of the young clansmen had really experienced it, thus, they couldn’t relate to the violent history of their ancestors. Nwoye, for example, is attracted to different things than his father; his interests resemble more like those of Unoka. This might explain why Nwoye is so hated by his father. Christianity is totally different than Ibo religion, the Christian god is not a mysterious being, he accepts everybody and he is like a father that rules his followers with love, something previously unknown to the Ibo people. The young Ibo, the ones that had lost faith in their native religion, found refuge in this new, loving Christian god. One can also argue that religion was only a tool used by Great Britain to conquer West Africa. Then it would have been the missionaries and not religion that made things fall apart for the Ibo. Religion could have been seen as a tool to gather all of the people that were disillusioned with their native beliefs. By converting the natives to Christianity, the missionaries took what tied the natives to their clan and started living doing things the clan rules had forbid them to do such as keep twin babies from being abandoned in the evil forest, insulting spirits by unmasking the egwugwu. What was once one the most admirable things in the clan: violence, has now become useless, the old values of Ibo society have completely gone down the drain because of the missionaries. The Christian villagers, the majority, obeyed what the missionaries said. Once a maximum of natives were converted, it would have been easy for the colonizers to completely assimilate the region to their empire. In this way, the missionaries are responsible for the clan’s downfall. But the villagers can also be blamed for this because they didn’t take the appropriate action to rid their village of this external enemy. Finally, it is mainly because of British oppression that the village, along with the clan, fell apart. The effects of colonialism, Christianity and imperialism rid the Ibo people of their native religion and left them with nothing. Thus, Things Fall Apart recreates the conflict between European and native African cultures and illustrates the tension between the two worlds.