Chinua Achebe

Cultural collisions between different groups of people that are forced to live together are bound to happen, especially if those two groups have completely different ways of life. Chinua Achebe depicts what cultural collision can do to two different groups of people in his novel Things Fall Apart between the main character Okonkwo and the colonizers that come to his village, Umuofia. Okonkwo, an aggressively over-masculine, hot-tempered, traditional man, comes to face his old traditions and ways…

unremarked.” (Achebe 343). From this essay forward it seems that the academic discussion has continued and academics still argue to this day whether Conrad’s descriptions are because he was racist or whether these descriptions are merely representative of the time in which they were written. In another important essay response to Heart of Darkness, Edward Said not only discusses the novella but he responds to Achebe’s essay challenging whether or not Conrad’s words represent overt racism as…

before the contact with the West. The arrowheads of this renaissance were the inimitable Chinua Achebe, Ngugi WA Thiongo and a host of other prominent African writers. These colossi straddled the fictional realm by challenging the jaundiced western portrayal of the African image to the world through their vociferously unapologetic writings. Prof James Tar Tsaaior allusion to Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe encapsulates this phase. ‘… Things Fall Apart has always refracted the classic novel as…

The Nigerian culture, full of richness and charisma around its citizens and leaders. The novel written by Chinua Achebe puts its focus on the rituals and customs of nine Nigerian villages, among them the most important one Umuofia. Umuofia is home to the bravest warrior of all nine villages, Okonkwo a strong leader with few weaknesses, but one that impacts his whole life driving him into physical and mental misery. Life is never perfect, and Okonkwo served as a tragic her. Okonkwo’s traits and…

Title Cultures have a variety of customs, and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe literates the customs of an African tribe well. Currently I am at the part where Okonkwo beat one of his wives during the Week of Peace because she was out getting her hair plaited. The actual violence did not surprise me awfully because females have been oppressed for centuries through a multitude of ways from systemic tyranny to violence. What struck me as fascinating is the fact that a man’s success is…

and seize families, wealth, resources, culture, and freedom. This time period was split cleanly in two: the self-righteous colonizers and the African natives. What one group saw as human progress was perceived by the other as the greatest of wrongs. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness make an especially interesting comparison because one is told from the perspective of a native man and another is told from the perspective of a white outsider. With these two…

Who are you? Who am I? These are the questions we would ask ourselves and people around us if we were betrayed by our culture. Chinua Achebe’s novel titled Things Fall Apart explains Ibo culture’s story on the precipice of revolution. Achebe depicts the cultural collision of the Igbo traditions and ways of life and the winds of change that are introduced by British missionaries as they settle into their region. Within this realm of complexity and uneasiness among the Ibo tribe who approach these…

In Chinua Achebe 's novel Things Fall Apart, the Ibo society has a strict system of behavioral customs that are given by gender. These customs and beliefs restrict the freedom of Ibo woman and help to reinforce generation after generation the thought that Ibo men are superior to women. Considering the feminist and the masculine lenses that represent the people in the village, it becomes helpful to interpret how men are viewed in a different perspective compared to women. In the…

Okonkwo’s relationship and as a father figure with Ezinma, Ikemefuna, and Nwoye in the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was complex. The individual connection that Okonkwo had with each of his children had extreme high and lows during the novel. Ezinma was the only child of Okonkwo and his second wife Ekwefi. She was his favorite daughter. She was also the only child out of ten children that Ekwefi had that made it past three years old. Okonkwo was very fond of her but only very…

opportunity under the director in this case Kenny and Britain. Moreover, this demonstrates how the younger generation and the Indian population are becoming weaker by fluffing the foreigner’s needs. Similarly, in the passage of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe shows how the people of Nigeria have not fought back, but supported by helping the British…