The Igbo In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

In the novel Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, religion, an indispensable tradition is celebrated within the Igbo people. The Igbo people, hosts gatherings, worship, and celebrate their ancestors. They are polytheistic, in other words, they believe in many gods. The Igbo people also believe in sacrifices to their ancestors and crimes are considered as sins. Their ancestors and gods serve as a role model, or a sculpture, to whom they worship and sacrifice in Igbo society. However, the arrival of the European Missionaries not only brings tremendous changes to Igbo religion and culture, but also creates conflicts among them.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is a story about personal beliefs and customs, and also a story about conflict. There is struggle between family, culture, and the religion of the Ibo, which is all brought on by a difference in personal beliefs and customs of the Igbo and the British. There are also strong opinions of the main character, Okonkwo. We are then introduced to the views of his village, Umuofia. We see how things fall apart when these beliefs and customs are confronted by those of the white missionaries.

Before the arrival of European influence, villagers of Umuofia had a single option for a way of life. It was a place to be feared, dominated by war and violent practices. Ibo culture is centered on a patriarchal system based on hierarchy; the highest titles held by male egwugwu in the legal system and the osu at the bottom. The main character, Okonkwo, represents the ambition to strive for a higher position in society in order to gain status: “His life had been ruled by a great passion-to become one of the lords of the clan” (131). Another aspect in Ibo culture is the representation of women. They are undermined in order for men to achieve success; bride prices are used to able men to marry more than one wife and husbands are

The Igbos used consensus to run their villages. They had the ndichie also known as the leading citizens run meetings where they would argue about issues. The Igbo had set up a system to stop men from achieving too much power. For men to be able to claim a higher title they would have to pay money to to the poor. To be able to reach the highest rank in the tribe you had to pay the debt of every man in the tribe, resulting in many men not achieving this rank. Unlike in many cultures, women held a spot on the social structure. Daughters of the clan were known as the umuada, they were the authority in the markets and they handled the civic. Men who abused their wives in public were abused with hurtful signs from the women in the rest of their village(McDougal

Chinua Achebe’s, Things Fall Apart, is a story of a traditional village in Nigeria from inside Umuofia around the late 1800s. This novel depicts late African history and shows how the British administrative structure, in the form of the European Anglican Church, imposed its religion and trappings on the cultures of Africa, which they believed was uncivilized. This missionary zeal subjugated large native populations. Consequently, the native traditions gradually disappeared and in time the whole local social structure within which the indigenous people had lived successfully for centuries was destroyed. Achebe spends the first half of the novel depicting the Ibo culture, by itself,

Africa was always a savage place with no civilizations or so the white man thought. When the British first came to Africa to colonize it, the British writers wrote about how it was a savage land and had no makings of a civilization. That was completely wrong. A group of people cannot survive for thousands of years without some aspects of civilization. The novel Things Fall Apart (by Chinua Achebe) talks about and shows examples of all seven elements that make a civilization. Things Fall Apart shows some aspects of civilization such as religion, government, and social structure. In the novel, Achebe shows the Igbo culture is a fully functioning civilization.

Like many other tradition societies, Igbo held men higher than woman on the social ladder. Men can take titles while women can not. Women even have no say in the village council nor they can grow king crop Yam.

The Igbo community is developed because they have fair ideology practice. For example, when Okonkwo shot his gun on accident and hit Ezeudu's son who’s father the clan was burying it says “The only course of action was to flee from

The position of elders are one of the most respected. The elders have a lot of power in Umuofia. The elders are the most wise and truthful people in the village and they were to be called on to make wise decisions. They are supposed to be people that is connected with the gods. As you can see there is no women elder there is only men elders. As you can see from this that the men are more well respected then the women. Title for the Men was in the Igbo culture it was the boy's job to take the father's role. The Ibo men were considered more superior over the Ibo women. Only men work to get higher levels of social states. You can see that the men are more superior than the women and the women can not get a higher role than the men. Position and Justice for women some of the women had very few respect and justice in the Igbo culture. Majority of the women had no justice in the justice system only few women did.But the women did have a hand in the oracles of priestess. If someone kills a clansman they were to be outcasted for seven years and all the things that person had was to be burned as soon as he or she was outcasted.If a Umuofian woman was to give birth to twins was to be outcasted out in the evil forest and left there to die because twins were supposed to be evil .Also when a women was to die she was to be buried in her motherland not at her

These things included: how to farm his family’s plot of land, how to hunt, to take care of the house, and other things the man of the house has to take care of. Before Okonkwo was banished, he teaches his son Nwoye and he “helped him by fetching the yams in long baskets from the barn and in counting the prepared seeds in groups of four hundred,” to prepare the crops for harvest (Achebe 24). The women while much less important in Umuofia also learn what it means to be a caring wife that does her husband’s bidding. By age twelve boys are suspected to know how to run their own farm and rule their household and wives to truly prove he is a man. A man, even though they have great masculinity always go back to their mother for comfort and “Is it right that you, Okonkwo, should bring to your mother a heavy face and refuse to be comforted?” (Achebe 101) Even though the males run the village of Umuofia they always have that little pull on them as children to go back to their mothers for comfort. A true man in the Ibo culture would be tough how to get titles easily and effectively in the clan to rise to a higher power in their “government” that the people have

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart gives us a vivid description of the Igbo culture through the stories of Okonkwo and his village, Umuofia. In regards to Igbo culture, contributions of women cannot be ignored. Although their position and status seems to be underestimated by the people in the novel, women do play an important role in the Igbo culture in four aspects: women take care of the children, do all the housework, serve as priestesses, and build relationships with other villages.

11, para. 2). Because the village of Umuofia is widely feared, Mbaino peacefully presents a fifteen year old boy and a virgin to Umuofia as retribution for the killing, and it is decided the boy, Ikemefuna, will stay with Okonkwo until the elders decide his fate. “Ikemefuna's stay in Okonkwo's home was supposed to be a temporary arrangement -- until the clan decided what was to be done with him -- but he ended up living as a member of the family for three years” (Akwani, 2011, para. 11). Okonkwo places Ikemefuna in the home of his most senior wife, who is also the mother of Okonkwo’s oldest son, Nwoye.

When a man wanted to marry a woman, he had to pay the bride price to her relatives if htey accepted him. Each day, the wives had to prepare their own dishes for their husbands and would have to obey them for whatever reason. Although their order might go against the wives' will, they could not question their husbands because it's against the cultural traditions. When a child was born, it belonged to its father and his family instead of the mother's because the man was the head of the family and the wife was always supposed to obey his command. But when a man was in an exile, he  would have to return to his mother's kinsmen until the period of exile was over . Furthermore, when a woman died, she was taken home to burry with her own kinsmen and not with her husband's. Chinua Achebe described these customs clearly in the story because they revealed the distinctness of the Igbo women at that time and these traditions made the story more appealing to the readers.

The society that we live in today is known to be male-controlled and we give no intention of accepting women as the dominating species. In many African societies that exist today, the condition, the amount of pain they endure, and the amount of work they do and yet they receive to hospitality, no respect, and no status. The importance of women is a game changer, it is a scale which balances when women are in the picture and drops when they are not. Unfortunately, women are not appreciated as much as they should be It is a shame, where such a human being is not cared about in any regard even though they are the ones who do the most in day to day activities and work. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is an incredible tome of African composition at its finest that is beautifully describes the Ibo lands and culture in Africa being taken over by British establishment. It very well describes the harsh fragments of being a woman in the Ibo Society and the consequences that come with being a female. The men in Ibo society have been taught from their passed down culture and religion to treat women harshly.

Like a steel shiv through flesh, the European culture made a deep gash in the Igbo culture as a result of their colonization of Nigeria. This left a scar on the Igbo culture, signifying the mark left by the Europeans that will never revert back to what it once was. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart manages to encapsulate the dawn of these events and portray to the reader the consequences of Europe’s invasion of Nigeria. More specifically, the author manages to project these consequences through the character of Okonkwo within the novel, establishing his identity before the Europeans hit, how this colonization alters his thoughts and feelings, all the while utilizing him to bring home the idea, or theme, of the importance of adapting to inevitable change.