Unbiased Portrait of Traditional Ibo Culture

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To understand or comprehend a novel, we must suspend our beliefs, values and morals with regard to our culture. By establishing such a mindset when reading a novel can helps us to understand certain practices considered unacceptable in our own culture. In Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Achebe presents an unbiased portrait of traditional Ibo culture. Certain cultural practices, laws and government cannot be ignored because as some qualities shaped the society other ones caused it to fall.

Achebe has chosen the appropriate title for his work, Things Fall Apart. Under the invasion of Christians, Ibo society fell apart. Achebe illustrates a traditional and unified society that little by little broke apart because of white missionaries that introduced their religion to the Ibo society. The collapse of Ibo society cannot be completely blamed on the Christians but also on the Ibo customs and beliefs that troubled some of the peoples mind. Achebe included some of the positive and negative aspects of Ibo culture and it is through some of his characters that he voiced objection to some of the Ibo the customs and beliefs.

During Ezeudu`s funeral, Okonkwo`s gun fire accidentally into Euzeudu`s sixteen year old son. Because killing a clansman was a crime against earth goddess, Okonkwo had to take his family into exile for seven years. Men from Ezeudus`s clan burned Okonkwo`s huts and kill his animals to wash the village of his sin. “Why should a man suffer so grievously for an offense he had committed advertently?”(Achebe 125). Although not intentionally, Ibo society banished a person for committing a female crime to keep order in the society. By giving such penalty a person is reflecting...

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...o thought about things. While thinking about Okonkwo`s exile he “remembered his wife`s twin children, who he had thrown away. What crime had they committed?” (Achebe 125). When missionaries introduced their religion Nwoye and many others felt that they had found answers to all of those questions that hadn’t make sense to them.

The way some cultural practices, laws and government are illustrated in novels such as Things Fall Apart are hard to accept because there are just some things people cannot agree on. In the case of this novel, Christians were the cause why some of those cultural practices and laws fell apart. By putting one`s culture aside and understanding novels in which certain practices are considered unacceptable in our own culture we are opening our mind to decide what’s wrong and what’s right without judging our cultural differences.

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