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They were segregated to a corner of the village close to the Greta Shrine and they were considered to be at the bottom of the societal rung, well below the children. In a sharp contrast, the Christianity disregarded the social order of the Umuofia people and imbibed the Osu into the church, shaving off the tangled hair off their heads and treating them like brothers. They were taken from the lower societal position to be very important and rich people in the society and treated as 'all children of God and they must receive these as their brother' (Pg 111) as Mr. Kiaga, a stanch convert, referred to them as being.
The white man also disrupted the family pattern and peaceful coexistence that there was before their coming. There before, the word of the father as the head of the family was final unless overruled by the Egwugwu. This is no longer the case in a society where everything is falling apart. Umoye, Okoknwos son, takes the liberty to convert to Christianity even without the consent of the father. This he does even with the knowledge that his father loathes whites and their religion....
Furthermore, he refuses to back off the religion despite the reprimand from his father, indeed he goes ahead to change his name to Isaac, a Christian name and thereafter runs away from home to permanently stay with the Christians. In a way, the Okonkwo's family is falling apart thanks to the white man's indulgence.
In general, the coming of the whites into Umuofia village totally disrupted the cultural trends of the Umuofia people, right from their agriculture and economy, the justice system, the social life and even the family lifestyle. The whites are viewed as ethnocentric and egoistic people who want all the cultures to change towards their own cultures. When things seem like they cannot change, and the fight against change seems to Okonkwo as a fight that he is fighting alone, considering the achievements he has worked hard to get and would not like to lose them to the western ways, he commits suicide and quits the disrupted and corrupt white man's society.
References
Achebe Chinua,(1958). Things Fall Apart. New York: First Anchor Books, 1994.
Things Fall Apart repudiates imperialist and colonialist ideology almost goes without saying and is one of the primary underlying purposes and themes of the novel (Osei-Nyame, 1999, p. 148). Things Fall Apart is so much more than an anti-colonialist novel or even a post-colonialist one. The novel conveys complex moral ambiguities that plague human societies whatever their ethnicity or geographic location. Okonkwo is a fierce, unyielding, patriarchal hero whose
Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe is one of the most influential and powerful writers of today, and he is also one of the most widely published writers today. Chinua Achebe has in fact written more than twenty-one novels, and short stories, and books of poetry as well, and his very first landmark work was "Things Fall apart," which was published in the year 1958, when the author was just twenty-eight years
Things Fall Apart is not necessarily a novel about globalization, but the implications of a changing world -- and that includes issues related to globalization along with the fading of colonialism -- are an important part of this novel. On the surface this novel is the telling of a nationalistic-themed tale about the tragic circumstances surrounding the initial respect that Okonkwo had from the Igbo culture, along with his demise,
Smith hates the Igbo faith so much that he equates it to the Baal and the followers of Baal in the Biblical Old Testament. He has strict policy over conversion to Christianity such that any elder to decides to get converted to Christian faith must immediately abandon the traditional ways and follow Christianity only. His cruelty and strictness to the abandoning of all Igbo traditional ways is seen when he
] [4: Ibid.] In Things Fall Apart, the reader can see how the British and French began to institute their governing and belief systems. Achebe writes, "[Apart] from the church, the white men had also brought a government. They had built a court where the District Commissioner judges cases in ignorance" and the prisons were "full of men who had offended against the white man's law." [footnoteRef:5] Furthermore, Achebe comments on
Colonial Resistance in Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe was born in Ogidi, Nigeria, and his father was a teacher in a missionary school. His parents were devout evangelical Protestants and christened him Albert after Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, although they installed in him many of the values of their traditional Igbo culture. He attended University College in Ibadan, where he studied English, history and theology. At the university Achebe