Things Fall Apart: The Fall of Traditional Igbo Society and Culture
Turning and
turning in the widening gyre
The falcon
cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall
apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy
is loosed upon the world.
Chinua Achebe, the father of modern
African literature, very aptly chooses the title and the epigraph of his novel Things
Fall Apart from W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” in order to adapt the process of the fall of
traditional Igbo society and culture. Set in the 1890s, the novel carefully
portrays, at first, the complex, advanced social institutions and artistic
traditions of Igbo culture; next, its contact with Europeans; and finally the
falling apart of the traditional Igbo culture.
At the first part of the novel,
Achebe presents the Igbo society as harmonious, coherent and peaceful and
illustrates various aspects of the traditional way of life of the Ibo people. Don
C. Ohadike writes of the pre-colonial condition of the Igbo people:
Their major preoccupations were
to live free from crime and sickness, to live in harmony with unseen higher forces,
to live in peace with themselves and their neighbors, to have many children and
grandchildren, and to produce enough food.
Some other
features of their culture that indicate harmony are following:
# The language
of the people of Umuofia is enriched (complex) and full of proverbs and
literary and rhetorical devices.
“Among the
Igbo . . . proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.”
However, Achebe’s translation of the
Igbo language into English does not sound, as Conrad did, “primitive.”
# The Igbo
culture is an institution full of traditional festivals.
# Individual
display of prowess is valued in Igbo culture. The best example is Okonkwo who
attains a position of wealth and prestige in spite of his low and shameful origin.
# Moreover,
the belief in the chi, an individual’s personal god, also smooths possible
tensions in the Igbo community.
When a man
says yes his chi says yes also. Okonkwo said yes strongly; so his chi agreed.
#
The Igbo culture is fairly democratic in nature.
However, Achebe also questions some
drawbacks of the traditional Igbo culture, though the Igbo people feel content
in them.
Ikemefuna is an innocent
sufferer of the irrationality of the society. He was ordered by the Oracle to
be killed except by his father, but Okonkwo killed Ikemefuna by his own hand,
because,
He was afraid of being thought
weak. (p.43)
The
society is also profoundly patriarchal. Okonnkwo is punished not solely for
beating his wife but for beating in the Week of Peace.
However,
the reflection of Obierika, Okonnkwo’s best friend, at the last of the first
part echoes the general question of the order
of the society,
Why should a man [Okonkwo] suffer so grievously for an offence he had committed
inadvertently? … He remembered his wife’s twin children,… What crime had they committed?
In the Second Part
of the novel, Achebe shows that two sorts of forces are responsible for the
falling of the society: external forces and external.
The external force is the arrival of the
colonial culture of missionaries, bureaucracy and white officialdom. The
initial result is, as Obierika
informs Okonkwo:
The
missionaries had come to Umuofia. They had built their church there, won a
handful of converts.
Some
internal factors of Igbo culture also contribute to the fall of the society.
The drawbacks and questions discussed previously symbolically get answers in
Christianity, through the converted character, Nowoye:
“The
hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer … the
question of the twins crying in the bush and the question
of Ikemefuna who was killed.”
One
of the oldest members of the unumna expresses his extreme agony at the deplorable
condition of the village as a result of the arrival of the colonizers in African
societies:
“An
abominable religion has settled among you . A man … can curse the gods of his
fathers and his ancestors, like a hunter’s dog that suddenly goes mad and runs
on his master.”
The third part of
the novel accounts how the white people’s law, education, power and economics
strangle and destroy the whole Ibo culture.
The colonizers
gradually take control over all the social institutions which is described in
the novel
The white man is
very cleaver. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. (p125)…[and]… a
government. They had built a court where the District Commissioner judged cases
in ignorance. (p.123)
As a result, “Umufia
[is] thrown into confusion” and a large scale conflict and “anarchy” between
the colonizer and the colonized after Enoch, a converted Christian, has attacked
the traditional culture by killing an ancestral spirit.
The next day, while
the villagers are meeting, some messengers from District Commissioner come to stop
the meeting. Okonkwo attacks and kills one of them,
“Okonkwo’s matchet
decended twice and the man’s head lay beside his uniformed body.”
But, Okonkwo finds
that the society has already fallen apart from the traditional unity and they
don’t associate him. Eventually Okonkwo commits suicide.
Okonkwo’s death is here symbolic, for
he represents the traditional culture. Obierika indicates that the
traditional Igbo culture does no longer survive. It has already fallen apart.
That
man was one of the greatest men in Umiofia. You drove him to kill himself; and
now he will be buried like a dog.
To
sum up we see that being a powerful post-colonial writing, Achebe’s novel
responds or ‘writes back’ to the novels like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
that treat Africa as a primordial and cultureless foil for Europe. Though he shows
some drawbacks of his traditional culture, actually Achebe attacks the
colonizers as responsible for spoiling their traditional culture. However
Achebe was not without counter attack. Chinua Achebe in his essay Colonialist
Criticism mentions such an attach by a literary journalist Honor Tracy,
under the heading of “Three cheers of Anarchy!”:
“These
bright negro barristers…who talk so glibly about African culture, how would
they like to return to wearing raffia skirts?’ Works Cited:
Ohadike, Don C. “Igbo Culture and History”. Things Fall Apart by
Chunua Achebe. Heinemann, 1996
Comments
Post a Comment