Things Fall Apart Christianity

In Chinua Achebe’s renowned novel Things Fall Apart, the West received its first level of consciousness into their colonial nature through the vantage point of an African perspective. Achebe’s classic refuses to feud the colonized against the colonizer, additionally he refuses to lighten the disconcerting circumstances and situations his native Africa encounters with the 19th century colonial powers. Achebe’s reading of the encounter of Ibo tribal life with Western entry into Africa is in many ways a tragic irony and almost fable-like. Furthermore, his understanding prevents any easy notions of exoneration for one side or the other. Achebe’s display of the complexities of this encounter between Ibo tribal life and Western Christianity show
At this time in the novel, “the Mother of the Spirits walked the length and breadth of the clan, weeping for her murdered son… It seemed as if the very soul of the tribe wept for a great evil that was coming – its own death.” Indeed, the conclusion of the book comes quickly thereafter. The clans begin falling apart and are no longer speaking in one voice or acting as one. When the court messengers come to break up the village’s assembly during a call to war by a gifted speaker, Okonkwo strikes down the head messenger. Regardless of the warrior’s passionate response, they “would not go to war. [Okonkwo] knew because they had let the other court messengers escape.” Ironically, the village that was so fast to change by being pacified to colonial rule maintains the firm taboo of refusing to bury Okonkwo when he kills himself for being the only Igbo who did not adapt to the increasingly oppressive command of Reverend Smith and the District
Okonkwo had built an entire life based upon what he had earned in response to the perceived shortcomings of his father. Never earning a single title in his life and dying with overdue debts, Okonkwo’s father was womanlike and untrustworthy. Therefore, Okonkwo stakes his entire life on the cultural traditions he was raised in because the family he was born into he viewed as unreliable, for both his father and his son, Nwoye. Certainly, he “shudders” at the thought of the ancient gods being completely renounced after Nwoye converts to Christianity. However, on the other end of the social spectrum but clearly showing signs of similar theo-political assumptions are Reverend Smith and the district commissioner. Embodiments of their colonial religion and government, Smith and the nameless commissioner shove their own traditions and culture in a foreign land absent of any honest communication between them. The district commissioner even stoops so low to deception in hopes to catch Okonkwo and the other village elders. What is at stake for the elders is the exact same fear of possibility that Okonkwo is threatened by – that if the “Other” is exonerated then all hope has been