Christianity has been both one of the most influential and incredible inventions in history, and also one of the most terrible epidemics to spread around the globe. In the novel Things Fall Apart, author Chinua Achebe craftily writes the tribe of Umuofia and it’s neighboring territories, during Colonial-Period Nigeria, as one of the many casualties that history oftentimes tries to gloss over. The arrival of white man and their new religion did not just bring sadness, though, and in some aspects helped the territories grow into the country seen today. In Things Fall Apart, Christianity guided the Igbo people by normalizing education, accepting everyone, and bringing money to the tribe, but also destroyed it by forcing leadership, discouraging
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To begin with, the white man set up a government modeled after what was acceptable at the time for European communities. The Igbo did not appreciate new leaders or foreign rules, described as, “But apart from the church, the white men had also brought a government. They built a court where the District Commissioner judged cases in ignorance. He had many court messengers who brought men to him for trial. … They [the kotma, or court messengers] guarded the prison, which was full of men who had offended against the white man’s law.” (150). The white men did not realize that the Igbo had their own, complex system of governing, and instead took it as savagery and chaos. A spoken discussion between Okonkwo and Obierika touches on this, on the topic of a recent land dispute. Okonkwo questions whether the white men understood the custom about land, and obierika replies, “How can he when he does not speak our tongue? But he says our customs are bad; and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say our customs are bad. … He has put a knife on the things that held us together, and now we have fallen apart.” (152). What the white Christians tried to do was homogenize the world, or make every territory and community uniform with what they thought was a utopia. What went against the ‘normal’ was unacceptable. The novel Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, wholeheartedly portrays the crumble of a traditional society because of Christianity, and a forced government, disrupted family life, and misunderstood practices. With this destruction, there was also a birth of a newer, modern community, that established education, included all people, and built economic assets. Whether or not the positives outway the negatives, or vice versa, comes down to perspective and opinion, but honestly, things did fall
To begin with, the white man set up a government modeled after what was acceptable at the time for European communities. The Igbo did not appreciate new leaders or foreign rules, described as, “But apart from the church, the white men had also brought a government. They built a court where the District Commissioner judged cases in ignorance. He had many court messengers who brought men to him for trial. … They [the kotma, or court messengers] guarded the prison, which was full of men who had offended against the white man’s law.” (150). The white men did not realize that the Igbo had their own, complex system of governing, and instead took it as savagery and chaos. A spoken discussion between Okonkwo and Obierika touches on this, on the topic of a recent land dispute. Okonkwo questions whether the white men understood the custom about land, and obierika replies, “How can he when he does not speak our tongue? But he says our customs are bad; and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say our customs are bad. … He has put a knife on the things that held us together, and now we have fallen apart.” (152). What the white Christians tried to do was homogenize the world, or make every territory and community uniform with what they thought was a utopia. What went against the ‘normal’ was unacceptable. The novel Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, wholeheartedly portrays the crumble of a traditional society because of Christianity, and a forced government, disrupted family life, and misunderstood practices. With this destruction, there was also a birth of a newer, modern community, that established education, included all people, and built economic assets. Whether or not the positives outway the negatives, or vice versa, comes down to perspective and opinion, but honestly, things did fall