Things Fall Apart: Tragic Hero

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is a book about the protagonist, Okonkwo, who is highly acclaimed by his tribe for his accomplishments. Even though his father was shamed across his tribe, he had manage to resurrect his family name. This book was meant to be a reataliation of other books written by white men who try to comment on his society. The book shows that there was a community and structure based on tradition and beliefs that the outsiders could not understand. The main character, Okonkwo, goes through some unfortunate hardships that he doesn’t realize where caused by his own actions until later in the book. Why would Achebe use the tragic hero archetype for Okonkwo? The first reason that would come to mind is to help normalize what the “outsiders” would think about the people. This would help stabilize the view of these cultures rather than exaggerating and misconstruing their society. In more detail, the situation in where Okonkwo climbs and falls in the rankings. He built himself up from the rubble of his father’s legacy (or the lack there of) and then he fell off. People in many society’s outside of the one in the book can relate to this situation. Of course he does include the cultural context (e.g. The locusts ruining their land yet they see it as a fortune, beating his wife during the peace week).  Achebe wants to show how, even though they are originated from different ideals and beliefs, that their system’s structure is organized and somewhat similar to the “outsiders”, more specifically the white Europeans. This similarity could help them stabilize and limit the exaggeration of barbaricness that could be the basis of why the Europeans colonize.

Colonization of the Ibo

Greetings to the Members of the Royal Colonial Institute. I have come in peace to discuss the process of colonization. Colonization is altered from how members of your group display it to the people of equal or higher class than yourselves. This affects both parties at hand and I will begin to explain exactly how this could occur. Let’s commence with the colonized. The perceived goal is to implement an organized political and religious structure to our society to help improve functionality. However, once colonialization begins, things fall apart. The population that these folk are trying to control could already have a structure that may seem folly and counter intuitive to outsiders but is esoteric and could only be understood by the people that animate the society. We already formatted our own civilized culture. But people like yourselves could not fathom the complexities that is our system. The same goes for our religion. You could never understand it if it struck your head. So, your misconstrued persecution of our society and culture gives justification that you are allowed to manipulate our people, or even cause mass genocide to reach your goals. Knowledge is never complete: two heads are better than one. Your perception, your knowledge of us isn’t the correct and complete knowledge. After you have full control over our communities, you begin implementing your beliefs into our system. You expect us to disregard the information we espoused since our youth. The people will reject the beliefs. This will cause more harm to both parties, especially the colonized as they are forced to learn the information. You also apply strange rules into our society that give our people a disadvantage and punish us if we break them.  Another point is the power. You have more power and also have a thirst for our resources as your resource are near inhabited population with class. You think we are an unwise people and will allow you to take what you like. But we understand the goal and the consequences that it will have on the Ibo people. So, you use your overpowered techniques to murder our people and enslave the next generation into destroying their own land and doing the work that you wouldn’t do. This unethical and shouldn’t be tolerated, but we cannot battle each other for our land. Once you have reached your goals and decide that we are useless and invaluable to you, you will leave us. But people will begin to discuss your atrocities that you’ve committed selfishly, which will damage your reputation. We must rethink our approach to colonialization and domestication or it will ruin the perception of each other’s parties and their reputation. The colonialized will have a belief that any exterior population are dangerous and they will begin to associate significant differences, like skin color, to certain situations.