Things Fall Apart Animals

The novel, Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe tells the story of a very proud man by the name of Okonkwo, who lives in a tribal village in Nigeria, when his life and the ways of his culture are torn apart by the Europeans. Animal imagery is very common in the folktales, fables, proverbs, oral traditions, and theories on the causes of natural phenomena that the people of the tribe exchange with each other. They use these animal figures to explain not only natural phenomena that science had not yet taught them about but also to explain why certain things in life go in the way that they go. The significance of the locusts, python, and tortoise includes that: the locusts parallel the coming of the white men; the python symbolizes part of the life …show more content…
Obierika, Okonkwo’s friend, speaks to him of the news, current events of the village, and what in general has happened since the clan exiled him for accidentally killing a member of the clan. He says, “I forgot to tell you another thing which the Oracle said. It said that other white men were on their way. They were locusts, it said, and that first man was their harbinger sent to explore the terrain” (Achebe 138-139). The white men start slowly, coming in few numbers. The tribes do not pay this as much attention as they should. The locusts swarm over and take over the land in a very fast, though gradual, manner. The white men do just this, slowly seep in and swarm over the land taking it over and making it their …show more content…
Okonkwo’s wife, Ekwefi, tells their daughter a story of a tortoise who tricks the birds to allow him to go to a feast with them. The tortoise makes the hosts of the feast think that he holds royal power over the birds and eats all of the food, but the birds have their revenge. They take all of the feathers that they gave him to fly to the feast with them and leave him up in the sky. He gets a bird to tell his wife to bring out the soft things that he owns so that he would not die if he fell, but the bird tells his wife to bring out all of the hard things he has. The tortoise, unaware of this, jumps down, “and then like the sound of his cannon he crashed on the compound…His shell broke into pieces. But there was a great medicine man in the neighborhood. Tortoise’s wife sent for him and he gathered all the bits of shell and stuck them together. That is why Tortoise’s shell is not smooth” (Achebe 99). During his exile, the feast in the sky, the clan’s traditions begin to fall at the hands of his former friends, whose support lies no longer with the ways of the tribe but those of the white men, the clansmen who convert to Christianity or the birds in the story, whose . What happens to the tortoise parallels what happens to Okonkwo, who after his