What Does Achebe Get Fair Treatment In Things Fall Apart

In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, it is shown that the African people had their own complex culture before the Europeans decided to "pacify" them. The idea that the dignity of these people has been greatly compromised is acknowledged in the essay "The Role of the Writer," which is explanatory of Achebe's novels. A writer trying to capture the truth of a situation that his readers may know little or nothing about needs a sense of history in order to appropriately address the topic. It is not enough "to beat" another writer to the issue. Writers should make the attempt to express a deeper understanding. Without proper mental investment in a written work, the

Chinua Achebe once said, "the world is like a mask dancing...if you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place," (Goodreads). Renowned for his novel Things Fall Apart, in which he responds to the stereotypes of the British who conquered the continent of Africa in the era of New Imperialism, Achebe explores Igbo culture through many aspects of daily village life. Contradicting the racism employed by whites in the 1890s in order to justify slavery in earlier history, Things Fall Apart offers a new fresh perspective into the lives of ordinary villagers of the Igbo tribe in Nigeria, before they are taken over by the British. Just as the whites in Europe, the tribe applies their own religion, customs, beliefs, and language to their lives. Through this lens the reader is able to extract a deeper meaning of the powerful message Achebe communicates by penning the famous novel.

Things Fall Apart is not the only “weapon” that Achebe created to challenge Western literature’s portrayal of Africa; he also wrote Image of Africa with the intention of abolishing the usual Western portrayal of Africa. “We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there we could look at thing monstrous and free” (Achebe, “Image of Africa” 251). Achebe’s reference here in Image of Africa brings light to how Conrad portrays Africa. Indeed, one can easily notice how each word brings up a negative connotation to the audience, which in this case, Conrad transforms the image of “the shackled from of a conquered monster” to “monstrous and free” in order to

Prior to Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, Africa had been viewed as a one dimensional entity, opposed to the amount of diversity it contains. Africa is the second largest continent behind Asia. This massive size, and varying terrain must encompass people as diverse as the landscape. These people can not be deduced to a stereotyped term of being “African”, because each African does not fit the preconceived image of what an african is. It is not a country it is a land mass with people, animals, and vegetation, that differ by all the many regions. This outline that has been constructed of what makes up an African is due to underrepresentation in the media. Achebe demolished this notion for his readers, by creating a world the reader can

All quotations are taken from the 1988 Picador edition of Chinua Achebe’s The African Trilogy "

The Effect of White Missionaries on an African Tribe in Things Fall Apart by Achebe

It was easier for people to look at Africans as creatures with “Iron Collars” and “Grotesque mask” which is why Chinua Achebe wrote “Things Fall Apart” which was set during the late 1800s to early 1900s when British were expanding their influence in Africa in order to display the true idyllic beauty of the African people. In “Things Fall Apart”, Achebe uses irony to reflect the importance of customs and traditions through Obierika. Achebe uses an esprit tone to explain the “Flaws” others misinterpreted about the Igbo community. Achebe disliked how Europeans depicted Africans as “passionate instinctive savages”, so he refutes those depictions to give a viewpoint from the inside, the colonized and not the colonizer.

Achebe’s Things Fall Apart serves as an outcry to the degrading perception of Africans by ethnocentric cultures (namely whites) as accentuated by assiduously practiced archaic traditions by African tribes. Thus said, the underlying theme becomes apparent as a protest to the ignorance and arrogance of an imperialist society as well as a analysis of distaste for stubborn traditionalists refusing progress. Consequently, the particular target audiences is easily identified as the developed Western world, with their patronization and disrespect for cultures alien to theirs, alongside neglectful and non progressing traditional tribes within Africa. Employing satire and rhetoric, Achebe effectively comments on a conflict that has emerged and reemerged countlessly throughout history and in doing so, makes a subtle statement on the ignorance as it transcends all levels of society.

Many of their people have converted to the new religion including Nwoye, the son of the main protagonist, Okonkwo. The author uses his novel to depict Africa in the way it truly is and not in the way most writers of the past and his day would, as savage and unruly. Achebe writes his novel to depict African society in a way that’s never been done before. He argues that Africans are not prehistoric and are actually very developed and socialized. He also argues that the way Africa is depicted by non-African novelists, is completely racist and wrong.

Stereotypes, harmful as they may be, exist for a reason. Just as every good lie has a kernel of truth, so does every stereotype. The danger in stereotypes is not in their truth, but in how they become the only portrayal of a group or faction of people. Binyavanga Wainaina’s essay “How to Write about Africa” addresses the singular portrayal of Africa as typically executed by Western authors. While “How to Write about Africa” is clearly intended as a scathing criticism of Western authors’ failure to portray Africa as anything other than one long set of stereotypes, several of Wainaina’s pointed jabs make appearances in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, such as the idea of the emotionally distant, abusive African warrior. Achebe includes stereotypes in his novel while simultaneously defying other Western conventions to demonstrate the complexity of his story, illustrating the point that, while stereotypes may appear, they are certainly not the only aspect of Africa.

One of the books I read for the summer reading assignment was Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I chose this book due to a recommendation from my mother, who has read and loved this book, and also because the colonization of Africa is a very intriguing subject to me. I’ve also read and enjoyed King Leopold’s Ghost, which was also on the list, but I didn’t think it would be fair to choose that. I find it interesting to learn about the impacts and chaos that European settlers caused for the African population during the Scramble for Africa, so I thought this book would be a good choice.

Achebe’s novel exists not only in English, According to Okpewho it exists in close to sixty languages (ref). This allows diverse readers to experience the novel and what Achebe is trying to show. Things fall apart has an important place in critical as well as cultural discourse because it invested a long and continuing tradition of inquiry into the problematic relations between the West and the nations of the Third World that were once European colonies. One of his decisions to write Things fall Apart in English according to Ookpewho is that he has a certain nostalgia post-colonial climate that framed his life and others that grew up in similar Nigeria small towns and villages. Achebe tells us in “The Novelist as a teacher” that as a writer he wants to educate his readers about the real lives and problems of Africans with the same commitment as physical and social scientists addressing the same issues, this is another reason why Achebe has written things fall apart in English, as somewhat of a teaching tool for his readers to understand

Throughout the book Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe challenges the typical stereotypes of colonial Africa. The story follows the lives of the Ibo people, and explains the culture and traditions of African tribes in Nigeria before and after being colonized by the Europeans.

At first, they were not taken seriously by the Igbo tribes but as time grew, the oppressed of the tribes quickly turned to the seemingly warm beliefs of Christianity. “He [osu] was in fact an outcast…wherever he went he carried with him the mark of his forbidden caste-long, tangled, and dirty hair…How could such a man be a follower of Christ”(Achebe- 156)? An osu was a person considered a pariah who had to wear long tangled hair as a mark of their lowly rank and ostracized from their communities. With Christianity’s “All men are created equal” religious motto, many of the Igbo people found comfort as compared to their traditional customs that had strict social stratifications, such as Okonkwo’s first born son Nwoye who believed Christianity was the answer to the moral questions his African god could not answer. Rather than portraying African customs as “good” and Christian influences as “bad”, Achebe builds unbiased credibility by not stereotyping the European perspective in terms of colonization. Achebe does not “sugar-coat” the seemingly inhuman values of the Igbo to be superior to Christian beliefs-he mentions the baseless

In my reading of Things Fall Apart, it has better informed me of a culture that I did not know of before, and by reading it helped correct some broad misconceptions that I previously held of the people and their cultures of Africa. Reading the novel also gave me another perspective on the effects of imperialism/colonialism by the Europeans on the Africans. I believe Achebe has succeeded in enabling the West an opportunity to have them "listen to the weak" (Achebe interview), but whether or not Western society decides to listen will come down to the individual within the society--if they do choose to listen to the call of the "weak." In this essay I will share