This document summarizes the cultural conflicts presented in Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart. It discusses the religious and social conflicts that arise when missionaries introduce Christianity to the Igbo people of Nigeria, disrupting their traditional religious practices and judicial system. It also examines the economic and agricultural conflicts caused by the missionaries, as they change the people's farming practices and devalue their crops. The document analyzes how these various cultural clashes ultimately lead to the disintegration of the Igbo people's culture and the breakdown of their community as colonial rule takes hold in the region.

1. Cultural
Conflict
in
Things Fall
Apart

2. Smt. S. B. Gardi
Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar
University
Prepared by- Urvi Dave
Course- MA- II
Semester- 4
Course No.- 14
Paper Name- African Literature
Batch Year- 2014-16
Enrolment no.- 14101009
email id- dave.urvi71@gmail.com

3. Index
Introduction of the writer
Prologue
Central theme of the Novel
Quotation
About novel and the conflict
Religious and Social Conflict
Economic and Agricultural
Conflict
Conclusion
Works Cited

4. Chinua Achebe was born in 1930 and was
brought up in a pioneer Christian family in
the large village of Ogidi, an early centre of
Anglican missionary work in Eastern Nigeria.
He had begun writing and publishing short
stories during his university years and
followed those with the draft of a novel
about the Nigerian encounter with
colonialism seen through the lives of three
generations within the same family. That
long draft was ultimately divided into two
parts, and published as Things Fall Apart in
1958 and No Longer at Ease in 1960.

5. His goals were modest when he began to conceive
and write Things Fall Apart in the early 1950’s-
‘I was quite certain that I was going to try my hand
at writing, and one of the things that set me
thinking was Joyce Cary’s novel set in Nigeria, Mr.
Johnson, which was praised so much, and it was
clear to me that this was a most superficial
picture... and so I thought if this was famous, then
perhaps someone ought to try and look at this
from the inside.’

6. Prologue
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things Fall Apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
- W.B. Yeats, ‘The second coming’
If we are oblivious what is happening around us, we will
be consuming what is happening around. In similar
manner what was happening in the natives societies,
people didn’t knew it. They all were oblivious. They were
not aware of the traditional/ native societies. After
sometime they came in contact with white man and they
didn’t knew how to react and things started falling apart.

7. The central theme of the novel is what happens to the values
that define Okonkwo’s cultural community and his own sense
of moral order, when the institutions he had fought so hard to
sustain collapse in the face of European colonialism. The
cultural hero who had defeated Amalinze the cat in the novels
first paragraph makes a regressive journey into exile and
ultimate death. Tragedy happens as Okonkwo's may have failed
because of his weakness as an individual, but his failure was
inevitable because colonial rule had destabilized the values and
institutions that sustained him. Indeed there is a close
relationship in the novel between Okonkwo’s individual crisis-
of authority and power- and the crisis of his community, which
increasingly finds its defining characteristics undermined and
transplanted by the new colonial order.

9.  The novel is divided in three parts-
1) Depicts life in pre-colonial Igbo land
2) Relates the arrival of the Europeans and the introduction of Christianity
3) Recounts the beginning of systematic colonial control in Eastern Nigeria
 It disrupted religious practices, judicial system and social life.
 The human consequences between the cultures affect the Umuofia
people’s religion, agriculture, judicial system and social life.
 Clash of cultures can be seen as a conflict of interests in the novel is the
fundamental interests of the colonising people’s is to undermine the
integrity of local traditions and cultures so that they can be replaced by
European and/or Christian institutions of government and of faith.
 With the arrival of ‘white’ man and the ‘white’ man’s religion and culture
comes the collision. The missionaries came to convert the people, they
belittle the Umuofia’s religious traditions and strongly urge them to
abandon their Gods.

10. Religious and Social Conflict
 Coming of the White man affects the people of Umuofia’s religion
and cause cultural conflict.
 Missionaries arrive and undertake a mission of Christian salvation
and colonisation.
 Okonkwo’s son, Nwoye, is severed from his family by the
missionaries and their religion.
 Nwoye joins the Christians, adopting their religion and separating
himself from his family.
 This turn of events shows an indirect product of the conflict
expressly created by the missionaries that sought to turn the Igbo
away from their traditional religion and to forget their Gods.

12.  The missionaries build a house in a forbidden region,
demonstrating a lack of understanding of local taboos. They also
receive outcasts as members of the church community.
 As the Christians and their converts continue to demonstrate a
lack of concern for the Igbo customs and taboos, they are
ostracized from the clan, a move that briefly creates an overt
clash between the two cultures, putting them at odds with one
another.
 Nwoye’s decision to leave his home is also helped by
Okonkwo’s anger, which is both part of his character, generally
and part of specific and focused response to the colonist mission
in Mbanta.

13. Obierika says
“The white man is very clever. He
came quietly and peaceably with
his religion. We were amused at his
foolishness and allowed him to stay.
Now he has won our brothers, and
our clan no longer act like one. He
has put a knife on the things that
held us together and we have fallen
apart.”

14. Economic and Agricultural Conflict
 People here were farmers and depended on agriculture
for their survival. Men, women and children, everyone
worked. The missionary’s arrival changed the way farming
was performed. It took children out of the fields and put
them in the classroom; it bought a new form of
government and it brought its own trade. Farmland was
devalued, crops were worth less money and economically
the people suffered.
 Okonkwo commits suicide because he has lost his
reputation as well as reputed man in his culture which was
now filled by the church and Christian values.

15. Conclusion-
 It shows true imperialist face behind it.
 It shows the disintegration suffered by
the poor and varied culture of the Igbo
land with the intrusion of the colonisers.

16. Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1958.
http://www.gradesaver.com/things-fall-apart/q-and-a/collision-of-two-cultures-1285
http://www.bookrags.com/essay-2005/3/12/171312/489/#gsc.tab=0
Class notes

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