Examples Of Cultural Collision In Things Fall Apart

Interactions between cultures don’t always end in peace. The differences in those cultures can cause these groups to have a cultural collision. When two cultures collide, they can either accept each other, leading to peace and unity or try to take control over the other, which almost always results in destruction. An example of cultural collision is in the book Things Fall Apart, written by Chinua Achebe. This book talks about a group of missionaries invading the Umuofia Village and forcing Christianity on their people. One character who didn't take it very well was a man named Okonkwo who was a proud member of his village and his religion. Okonkwo responded to the struggle between tradition and change by trying to cling to his dying culture, being stubborn, and attempting to retaliate towards the end because he felt as if his only reason for living and

The messenger crouched to avoid the blow[..] and the man’s head lay beside his uniformed body” (Achebe 204). To rephrase, Okonkwo killed the messenger because he wanted to rebel against the missionaries but it had failed. This shows Okonkwo was too stubborn to cooperate with the missionaries and resorted to violence. This incident is noteworthy because he has moments in the book where his stubbornness has minor consequences, but it is the first time in the book that his action will have serious consequences. Moreover, the paragraph explains how the Commissioner and his men walk around Okonkwo’s obi to find his body dangling from a tree on his property (Achebe 207). To reiterate, they walked around Okonkwo’s compound and found his body hanging from a tree. His death helped explain how Okonkwo thought that since his village and religion were going to fall apart, there was no more reason for him to live. One of Okonkwo’s worst fears, failure, had become reality for him and he didn’t want to live to see how his life would play out knowing he had failed