This document discusses racial discrimination and binary thinking in Chinua Achebe's novel "Things Fall Apart". It argues that Achebe presents a nuanced portrayal of African society that challenges stereotypes. The document analyzes how Achebe uses characters and events to highlight the complexities of African cultures and criticize simplistic "us vs them" and "black and white" ways of thinking. It also examines Achebe's critique of how Christianity was used to divide communities in Africa.

1. Racial Discrimination In “Things
Fall Apart”
• Name : Jitendra V. Sumra
• Roll No. : 07
• Semester : 04
• Year : 2013
• Paper No. : 402
• Paper Name : The African Literature
“ Dept Of English “
• Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar
University

2. He saw the world as a battlefield in which the children of light were
locked in mortal conflict with the sons of darkness.
According to Achebe's greatest example of this binary logic is
“He saw things as black and white. And black was evil.
He spoke in his sermons about sheep and goats and about wheat
and tares. He believed in slaying the prophets of Baal”.

3. "Things Fall Apart," Achebe presents a different idea of
Africans. They have families, religion, honors and
titles, music, economy, laws and a court system, complicated
farming techniques, a tradition of wise sayings and the art of
conversation; on top of this, they successfully practice an un-
autocratic style of communal living that Western societies long
for.

4. Achebe presents some of the same images of shadow that a
general and natural fear of literal darkness and solitude. By
showing Africans as also fearful of darkness.
Achebe is not meaning to say that Ekwefi is gullible or
easily scared; he means to say that in dark isolation, fear
overcomes one's understanding of truth and humanity.

5. What Achebe suggests is recognizing Africans and this goes for
all foreigners, including those of other
nations, religions, genders, sexual
inclinations, histories, economic backgrounds, political
status, and over all everyone alien to the self as fundamentally
human with the multitude of complexities involved in that, and
not as some "us and them" abstraction.

6. – This is Achebe's criticism of
• “Black and White" thought: that it is based on stories
read blind and alone “removed several degrees from
reality”.
– Achebe on the other hand comments that
• “it is better to be together than to be right or maybe
that unity is what's right”.
• “He criticizes Christianity not as something that is
wrong, but as something that divides communities
with its individual conversions”.

7. • Achebe's criticism of
• “We do not pray to have more money but to have more
kinsmen”.
• “We are better than animals because we have kinsmen. An
animal rubs its aching flank against a tree, a man asks his
kinsman to scratch him . . . “
• “A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to
save them from starving”.
• “They all have food in their own homes. When we gather
together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the
moon”.
• “Every man can see it in his own compound. We come
together because it is good for kinsmen to do so“.

8. Okonkwo is a character with whom the reader is likely to
understand the book - he is brutish, rude, scornful, proud
and profoundly sexist - but in reading his story, one comes
to sympathize with him at least a little, and one knows for
granted that he is a person.

9. Achebe relates the reasons behind individual and
communal crises in a society in which war
heroes, titled and wealthy subjects, and other
celebrated figures are dominantly male.

10. “If you look carefully, the women were never
really dealing alone with issues pertaining to
women, they were dealing with issues pertaining
to society”.

11. Achebe characterizes Umuofia’s women in the joys and
tribulations of their motherhood and selects specific
moments of their lives to represent some of the most
meaningful cultural and historical aspects of existence in
Igbo communities .