African Culture In Things Fall Apart By Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, is written in English so that Achebe can carry out the beliefs and experiences of his African culture. Even though the book, Things Fall Apart is written in English, Achebe used vocabulary that is spoken in his country to make the book more Africanized. Chinua Achebe’s first pronouncement stated, “Here then is an adequate revolution for me to espouse- to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement. And it is essentially a question of education; in the best sense of the word… I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers (African) that their past with all its imperfections- was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them (The novelist as Teacher).” The pronouncement stated is pointing out how, the assumptions of the English speaking societies have put down the African societies beliefs systems and way of functioning. With this being said, Achebe is striving for his society to …show more content…
This being said, Achebe shows that the Umuofia society and in extent, Africans are not savages, they are like everybody else. An example of a trial given in the book, “Things Fall Apart”, consisted of the elders/egwuwu listen to both sides of the story then come to a conclusion for a punishment. The case was as following, a husband wants to get his wife back because she had escaped from him, but it was said that he beats her. The conclusion of the trial was that the husband had to beg for the wife to return and if she refuses then he has to let her go and if he were to beat her again, they would chop off his penis. With this example, it may come across that the people in Umuofia were savage. This is their way of systematically coming to a conclusion and