A Single Story Of Africa

The novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe discusses the rise of an Igbo chieftain who came from great poverty to power and the eventual loss of Igbo traditions, rites, and the influence of his clan through his eyes due to western imperialism and colonialism. The intended audience for this novel is very broad, but if we tried to define it would primarily be people who have not experienced the Igbo culture and westerners or people who speak English. In this essay I will be focusing on the last six chapters: chapters 20 to 25. These chapters highlight the loss of power and customs of the Igbo people who have succumb to colonial rule. I fell Achebe is rhetorically effective and

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.

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

Chinua Achebe was educated in the West, though he hails from an African tribe. His exposure to both African and Western thinking gives him a unique perspective on the colonization of Africa, which is argued to be barbaric by some, but beneficial and necessary by others. In “Things Fall Apart,” Achebe perspective comes through as he masterfully describes a pre-colonization African tribe, and how colonization percolated through it. His authentic accounts of the positives and negatives of both tribal society and colonization leave the reader to answer the question of whether imperialism was morally justifiable or not.

Preconceived ideas about one’s culture often arises from stereotypes passed down from generation to generation. It is those stereotypes which shape one’s way of thinking, without being educated properly. In the novel Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, misunderstood culture is what drives the story of a small African clan called the Umuofia and the life story of Okonkwo, a fearless warrior and farmer. An in-depth look into pre-colonial African culture helps the reader discover and understand an unbiased point of view of a world one may not understand. In doing so, Achebe uses imagery as well as strong narration to describe the cultural norms and activities that the Nigerian tribe undergoes in everyday life. Through this he offers a nonbiased point of view, and communicates and accurate picture of pre-colonial African culture to a western reader.

I can relate to your “single” story on Africa. When all that is shown on television are sad commercials about how Africa needs help and how by donating only a dollar a month these starving kids can get help, stereotypes begin to form. Besides making Africa seem poor, this makes Africa seem monolithic when it is not, it is full of multiple diverse countries. While you have grown as a person and learned to deconstruct this notion of Africa, there are still many who still believe in this notion. I still see people sharing posts online that talk about how people in Africa are poor and all live in huts and hear parents telling their children to eat their food because kids in Africa have no food.

The novel “Things Fall Apart” written by Chinua Achebe, is a tale based on the traditional beliefs and customs of an Ibo village during late 1800’s Africa. Through the telling of this story, we witness the remarkable depth of Igbo culture through its functions of religion, politics, judiciary and entertainment.

“History is written by the victors” (--) and most of books about Africa was written by Europeans, who imagined themselves superior than any other races including Africans. The books portrayed Africans animalistic and ignorant people who “needed” the Europeans to help and consequently, a biased view, that represents Europeans as humane and civilizing but Africans as primitive and savage, became predominant all over the world. Chinua Achebe, who worried that the African culture would forever be “mistold”, decided to write a book Things Fall Apart, which provides readers an opportunity to see African cultures with different perspective from the others. Throughout Things Fall Apart, Achebe tries to change the stereotyped viewpoints of people – especially a Western audience – towards African cultures by showing how sophisticated the Igbo society is, how Europeans lacked

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.

This concept of points of view is evident through the novel, Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, an author from Nigeria, as there are several perspectives of this unfamiliar region of the world, of which have all developed into the stereotypical African single story––that African society is disorderly and unstructured. Because most African literature is not as prominent in the Western world, Achebe uses

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.

In Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, the reader is able to understand the complexity that is the Igbo village through their many different customs. The reader is also able to humanize the Africans through their strong desire to hold on to their culture, that is being ripped away from them by the Europeans. This can be seen as European writers such as, Joseph Conrad in Hearts of Darkness, falsely interprets African people, taking away their culture. Therefore, Chinua Achebe’s political purpose in writing Things Fall Apart, was to dismantle the primitive image western audiences had of Africans being savages, and tell their real story through the rich complexed culture of the Igbo village, the irony of the Europeans savagely ripping their culture apart, and the

The novel, things fall apart was set in the late nineteenth century which was a period of conflict and drastic change in Africa, where indigenous societies clashed with imperialistic European powers. The author, Chinua Achebe adds this tension of the historic British colonial expansion to present another dimension to Okonkwo's tragedy. Achebe challenges ethnocentric views of Africa through his use of language throughout the novel. The author also includes themes of Cultural relativism by introducing the Ibo’s traditions and language.

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

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a modern example of postcolonial literature and is one of the most influential pieces of its genre. Postcolonial writing presents important themes and lessons of justice, equality, and freedom that can be applied to present times. It reminds us of how important our freedoms are and why we need to protect them. The colonized write about their exploitation and show how there is persecution in their colonized society. Postcolonial authors use specific methods to undermine their colonizers and reveal their backward logic. Things Fall Apart has various examples of meta-narrative, decolonization struggles, and colonial discourse worked in throughout the novel. Chinua Achebe’s writing styles showcase these techniques to subvert his European colonizers.