Umuofia In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, he describes the customs and traditions of Umuofia, a small village where the Ibo people reside, and how the culture affects each individual. The story follows the main character, Okonkwo, and his life with his many children, three wives, and his transition to new beliefs that are introduced to him later on in the book. Okonkwo is depicted as a hardworking, successful farmer who is a blindly obedient patriot to Umuofia, and saturated in toxic masculinity through his relationships with his father, the traditions in Umuofia, and his role as a male in his village.
Okonkwo’s relationship with his father, Unoka, was one of the main relations he had that shaped who he would become in adulthood. His father had no money, no wife, was a drunk, and a terrible yam farmer which deeply

Okonkwo is blindly obedient to his spiritual beliefs and his villages beliefs, even allowing a child he took in to be killed because, “ The Oracle of the Hills and the Caves [had] pronounced it”(57). Ikemefuna, the child, had lived with him for three years and Okonkwo had grown very fond of him, yet when the Oracle pronounced that he would be killed Okonkwo did nothing to stop it, blindly following the customs of his village. In a later chapter Okonkwo is conversing with his friend Obierika only to be asked who tapped his trees for the sap later to be made into palm wine. Okonkwo told him, “Umezulike”(69), then later when discussing how young men killed palm trees just for tapping Okonkwo replied, “...the law of the land must be obeyed”(69). Okonkwo had no doubt that killing trees was fine to do just because there was a “law”, made up by his own people, that justified it. Okonkwo’s relationship with his culture’s customs and traditions have taken such a toll on him as an individual, even things that common sense dictates as bad, he thinks is