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Critical Essay #3
In the following excerpt, Sarr explores Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart from a cultural perspective.
Written about the past of Africa by a novelist who sees himself as a "teacher," Things Fall Apart encompasses several worlds, several experiences, sometimes complex, all altered or mixed. Achebe is never a mere reporter of public events. Talking of Things Fall Apart, he said: "I now know that my first book was an act of atonement with my past, the ritual return and homage of a prodigal son" [Achebe in Morning Yet on Creation Day, Heinemann, 1975]. The past that Chinua Achebe describes so beautifully in Things Fall Apart is a past that Achebe himself had to rediscover. It is a past that was largely lost as a result of twentieth-century Europeanization. This rediscovery of the suppressed past IS an act of faith and religious revival. Achebe, like the majority of African writers today, wants his writings to be functional, to serve as oral literature did in traditional Africa, reflecting the totality of actual experience. As David Cook tells us:
Close study of a passage from Things Fall Apart out of context is particularly likely to lead to pedantic fault-finding and to have little relation to the full Im pact the novel makes upon us since . . the achievement of this work is essentially an epic achievement in which the whole is greater than the parts and in which the parts cannot be appreciated properly when separated from the whole. [African Literature. A Critical View, by David Cook, Longman, 1977] John Mbiti similarly sees the holistic and communal nature of African culture in his statement: "I am because we are and since we are therefore I character, and it is difficult not to side with Nwoye in rebelling against this act. Nevertheless, Igbo history does not seem so different from that of the British who think they are civilizing the natives. A form of the principle of an eye for an eye is involved in Mbaino's giving Mbanta a young virgin and a young man to replace the "daughter of Mbanta" killed in Mbaino. It is the Old Testament principle cast in a more flexible and gentler mold, for the killing of Ikemefuna is dependent on the Oracle and thus is not, like the Old Testament law, inevitable. Further, the sacrifices of the virgin to replace the lost wife and of the young boy become a way to "avoid war and bloodshed" while still protecting one's tribe from injustices against it. Achebe, then, see this to depict this episode in terms which relate it to the development of the British, while also sympathizing with the impulses to change in Obierika and with the revulsion of Nwoye against the sacrifice which to him is so like the abandonment of twins in the Evil Forest The sacrifice of the virgin, of course, is also a reminder of the sacrifices of young virgins in the classical literature which is so basic a part of the British heritage....
Although Achebe depicts the treachery and ignorance and intolerance of the British, he does not represent the Europeans as wholly evil. Both the Igbo and the British cultures are for Achebe a mixture of types of human beings. Okonkwo and Mr. Smith are warrior types who will not compromise when their own cultures are threatened. Okonkwo favors fighting the Christians when in Abame one of them kills the sacred python, and he favors war with the Christians in Umuofia. In the end he cuts down the court messengers who come to disband the meeting in Umuofia. Likewise, the Reverend James is against compromise: "He saw the world as a battlefield in which the children of light were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of darkness."
Mr. Brown, on the other hand, is more like Akunna or Oblenka. He and Akulilia are willing to learn about the other's beliefs even if they are not converted to them. He and Obierika are thoughtful defenders of their own cultures. Mr. Brown recognizes the difficulty with a frontal attack on the Igbos' religion, and so he favors compromise and accommodation. Oblerika realizes that If Umuofia kills the Christians, the soldiers from Umuru will annihilate the village.
Achebe's novel, then, depicts for both Africans and Americans the actual and potential sources of modem Nigerian dignity. Things Fall Apart suggests that the perpeinal human types recur in all cultures and that all effective civilizations must learn to deal with those types. Revealing the Igbo ability in precolonial times to incorporate the variety of humans in a well-functioning. culture, Achebe refers his Igbo society to a series of standards which both Africans and Americans can seek as goals-a degree of redistribution of wealth, a combining of male and female principles, compelling art and poetry and music, tolerance, democracy, morality, a sound system of justice and, perhaps most important, the capacity for meaningful change. Lending veracity to his depiction of Igbo history by remaining clear-sighted about cultural weaknesses which need correction, Achebe depicts a worthy precursor of a healthy and just modem civilization.
Source: Akers Rhoads, "Culture in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart," in The African Studies Review, Vol. 26, No.2, September, 1993, pp. 61-72.
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