Personal Mythology Based on “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe

 

The works of the most prominent Nigerian prose writer Chinua Achebe tell about the colonial past and the present day of an independent African state. The process of breaking the traditional way of life of the African community and the attempts of the British colonial administration to introduce the original people to the “blessings of civilization” is shown in a vivid and fascinating form. National problems cannot be solved by means inherited from the colonialists – this is the writer’s main idea.


A slightly prolonged, smoothly viscous beginning plunges into the atmosphere of sultry, hot Africa, where the reader gets acquainted with the manners and customs of the inhabitants of Umuofia. The readers can look into the houses, understand what the inhabitants think and dream about, and see the world through their eyes. It is fascinating and unusual when a person is not shocked that all newborn twins are taken to die in the Unclean Forest because otherwise, their formidable God will become angry. There will be no harvest, or for unintentional murder, the whole family should go into exile to the mother’s homeland, the head of the family, for seven years.

People live with their worries from the season of planting yams to the time of their collection. Then white people came and started building churches and growing Christianity. Someone likes it, but someone is offended and dreams of driving away from the conquerors, and the protagonist Okonkwo belongs to the latter. His anger and impotence are very colorfully described, and the outcome is simply stunning in its tragedy. Achebe, in the novel, resurrects pictures of life in pre-colonial Africa.

He says that before the arrival of the colonialists, there were rituals, religion, orders, and laws, and, despite the cruelty of some customs, the people were not so brutal. Achebe is not trying to pander to the clichéd consciousness of the Europeans, who was convinced that primitive wild communities lived in Africa practically without any organization. He wrote an honest, truthful humanistic novel with living people.

This colorful work described the events in the 19th century when the English colonialists and Christian missionaries came to Nigeria (a country in West Africa). Inevitably, there is a clash of two cultures – in fact, two different worlds. Christians find the tribal traditions associated with pagan beliefs unacceptable and cruel: for example, the custom of taking all newborn twins to die in the forest so as not to anger the gods, who can punish for disobedience with crop failure. The tribe has a particular social structure with its hierarchy, as well as laws and justice: for example, murder is severely punished, even if it is committed unintentionally, by accident – in this case, the entire family of the murderer is expelled from the tribe for seven years – otherwise, the gods can be angered. However, other laws allow the killing of an innocent child who was previously taken from another tribe as compensation for the death of his fellow tribe. In his novel, the author directly alludes to the possibility of a revolution in Nigeria, quoting a poem by Yeats.