How Things Fell Apart

Things Fall Apart is a novel that deals with Chinua Achebe’s own culture and the problems they had to go through when the colonizers arrived from the Igbo point of view. The main message in the novel is clearly stated since the beginning, starting with the title, this is a story about change and through the distinctive narrative, written in English for the westerns but still full of Igbo words and elements, Achebe shows through the eyes of Okonkwo, a great warrior and leader of his clan, how things slowly started changing and falling apart, for himself and his tribe.

The complexity of the Igbo culture is the first thing shown in Things Fall Apart, the many contradictions imposed by their own laws, like having to kill someone form a neighboring clan over a conflict but considering murder of a tribe’s member an offense against the earth, and the harshness of some of their beliefs, such as leaving new born babies in the forest because of their evilness as twins, have to be fully appreciated in order to see how such a culture might fall apart when confronted by radical change, such as the introduction of Europeans’ laws and religion. The novel achieves its purpose by portraying the insight of and individual life at the end of the 19th century before and after the African colonization. Okonwko, a man of tradition, is therefore shaken little by little by disruptions of his daily routine to foreshadow what is yet to come.

At first the changes are small and appear gradually imposed by Okonkwo’s own clan’s traditions such as Ikemefuna’s “adoption” and later death, still the reader can feel Okonkwo’s despair at the changes that are appearing in his life and the feelings that rise from these. Okonkwo, as many of the clan elders, is not a man of change and he is not someone to give into his feelings, the reactions he gets to experience from the sudden disruptions of his life lead him to believe something is wrong with him” 'When did you become a shivering old woman,' Okonkwo asked himself, 'you, who are known in all the nine villages for your valor in war? How can a man who has killed five men in battle fall to pieces because he has added a boy to their number? Okonkwo, you have become a woman indeed'"(56).These sort of negative outlooks on himself lead Okonkwo to devastation when greater changes came his way.

Okonkwo was exiled later in the story for killing a tribe’s member and it was the toughest thing he had ever faced “It was like beginning life anew without the vigor and enthusiasm of youth, like learning to become left-handed in old age" (113). But it was during those seven years in which Okonkwo felt nothing worst could happen that the missionaries arrived with their church and new set of beliefs. Fear for the culture spread in the hearts of elders and people like Okonkwo refused to accept the intruders completely maddened by the change, yet relief and gladness appeared in characters like Nyowe who found peace and answers within this new religion. Others who had suffered because of their old beliefs, like the banished members of the clans and the mothers of twins, also found great consolation and gratefulness in these changes that were giving them hope; therefore the clan started breaking apart.

Okonkwo started to see things would never be the way they had, but he could not accept the coming of the white man to the land, he could not understand how his countrymen could be destroyed rather than defend themselves. As a great warrior and a man of wealth he felt it was duty, along with all the elders, to stop the missionaries and the chaos they were bringing along to Umuofia, but the end was marked by the Oberika’s words to Okonkwo:

Does the white man understand our custom about land? How can he when he does not even speak our tongue? But he says that our customs are bad; and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad. How do you think we can fight when our own brothers