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What Is Okonkwo's Culture In Things Fall Apart

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Home, it is the place that we feel the safest and most comfortable. In the book, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe tells us a story about colonization in Africa, and how one society destroys the home of others. The natives attempt to keep their culture within their society, but ultimately fail. Achebe is stressing that the native people don’t need to be rescued by anyone, and they have and always will do just fine on their own. He does this by explaining their culture in strenuous detail, the characteristics of the main character, Okonkwo. Things Fall Apart is comprised of three parts. Achebe takes the entire first part of the book to fully explain the culture of the people. 122 pages of Ibo culture is explained in the book so we don’t question …show more content…

Okonkwo is a very well respected man within his society. He is a well known wrestler, has three wives, many children, titles within his society, multiple barns, and is well respected. Achebe describes him as very hardworking, never lazy, he does not tolerate weakness and gets angry and violent very quickly. When the white men come he wants fight, others do not jump to violence this quickly. “Okonkwo warned the others to be fully armed. “An Umuofia man does not refuse a call,” he said. “He may refuse to do what he is asked; he does not refuse to be asked. But the times have changed, and we must be fully prepared”’ (Achebe 193). Achebe writes Okonkwo to be strong, and deal with any problem that he is faced with. An example of this would be Okonkwo’s first yam harvest. It was the worst season that their home had seen in a very long time, one man even hung himself. Okonkwo said that if he could survive that, he could survive anything. Conditions in his home got so bad that he killed himself. “Then they came to the tree from which Okonkwo’s body was dangling,...”(Achebe 207). The white men came to rescue the native people, but they forced one of the towns strongest men to hang

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Okonkwo tries to fight the changes made by the Western people. Okonkwo’s response to the Western people trying to bring Western ideas into the Ibo culture are simply trying to fight back at the Western people with violence. Okonkwo is a strong and fierce leader, but throughout the story, he is challenged by the Western people and the cultural collision because Okonkwo is supposed to be the leader of Umuofia. Okonkwo is supposed to fight back for his village and not stop until he gets it done. In the story Achebe quotes, “He was a man of action, a man of war.

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Okonkwo, a character in Chinua Achebe’s, Things Fall Apart, is a

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Okonkwo is a very strong man who is looked up to by many. He ruled his home with an iron fist. Okonkwo was the man who first opposed the british. Okonkwo decided to not follow the british and the christians even to the point of hitting his own son when he found out he changed religion. "Answer me," roared Okonkwo, "before I kill you!"

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Okonkwo was a big supporter of physical and verbal abuse in his home, especially towards his wives and Nwoye. To Okonkwo, physical abuse was another language. This is how he spoke, and punished, on the occasion of the abuse, and how he had handled the situation. Women was treated poorly in Umuofia because men believe that they were weak and in inadequate. “ Even as a little boy Okonkwo had represented his father 's failure and weakness, and even now he still remembered how he had suffered when a playmate had told him that his father was Agbala.

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Okonkwo does not want to be associated with a man of such disgrace in the community. Okonkwo is a very courageous man, “But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness... It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father... And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion – to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness” (Achebe 13).

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“The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.” Chinua Achebe. Achebe uses many characters perspectives in the book Things Fall Apart for people to the feelings of the characters. Achebe uses many perspectives to set up scenes in the novel in order for the audience to understand the characters.

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Okonkwo was the son of a lazy man who died as an abomination to their clan. He was a man in debt who not only did not work, but was also useless in battle, being as he could not stand the sight of blood. All his father had done was sit around playing his flute which disappointed Okonkwo. Okonkwo had different views on how men should live, and in turn he grew up despising his father for his actions. Okonkwo’s fear of being like his father ruled his life as though there was never enough he could do to prove otherwise; this progressively becomes clearer when he shows he can not live with the failure and downfall of his people.

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Among those of the same culture, individuals who are adaptive and open-minded can be successful when there is cultural collision. When the Igbo and European cultures collide, Okonkwo gradually spirals out of control, losing everything he values and his own sense of self. From the beginning of the novel, Achebe depicts Okonkwo as a virile warrior and a successful farmer within the Igbo tribe. Reacting with violence to anything he considers “womanly” or “weak”, “He was a man of action and man of war” (10). Because of his reputation as a warrior he is highly respected by his community.

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For Okonkwo, being truly successful means becoming a better man than his father. Throughout Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo is afraid that he will become like his father, who was both lazy and cowardly. Okonkwo, determined to emerge from his father’s shadow, lives his life in order to gain the respect of the other villagers. As a young man, he defeats Amalinze, a great wrestler who had gone undefeated for seven years (Achebe 1). As he grows older, he becomes a wealthy farmer, with two barns full of yams (Achebe 8).

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He has three wives and eight children but unlike most men, he cares more for is daughter Enzimna than his oldest son, Nwoye because he thinks he is lazy, weak and effeminate. Okonkwo was always embarrassed by his father, Unoka, who was lazy and effeminate but that made him the strong leader who he became. When he was young, he defeated the best wrestler in the village, earning him lasting prestige. Okonkwo does whatever he can to look strong and is terrified of looking weak. As a resault,

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Okonkwo was an important person in Umuofia because he represented his village and he was the idol of his village. Everyone in his village respected him for being so brave, for example Okonkwo beat in a wrestling match Amalinze the Cat when Okonkwo was eighteen this shows how brave Okonkwo was. But Okonkwo had a weakness in his mind he didn’t thought important decisions twice that’s why he ended killing himself after he cut the head of a British

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Things Fall Apart was written by Achebe in the years before the collapse of colonialism. Many people wanted the Europeans gone so things can go back to normal again. The effects of colonialism, though, were “not something from which you could recover, really” (Achebe Interview). This quote says that the policies and the influence the Europeans had placed on the Ibo have gone so deep that a revolt is not what is needed to save because nothing will. The Ibo would have to keep moving forward and adapt.

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Okonkwo uses these traits to differentiate from Unoka and he even feels most like himself when he exhibits violent behavior in order to assert his power and authority over others. Literary critic Christopher Ouma affirmed Okonkwo’s genuine intention to change how he is regarded in society.

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