Things Fall Apart Part II

Something that we discussed in class was orality and literacy in language. Language usually reflects culture. On the board we talked about oral accounts and how culture is passed down. Communication is important in every culture and causes barriers between other tribes and cultures because some things have different meanings. In Achebe's Things Fall Apart you know that this was intended for the West to read more than Nigerians.

In the second half of this book we see the main character Okonkwo a few years in exile. What stood out to me was during his seven years in exile, before he returns to Umuofia he prepares a feast. He regrets that he did not increase his status and influence in his own group. What really stood out to me was that he deeply regrets spending time with un-masculine people which is what I discussed in most of my last blog post. “Does the white man understand our custom about land?” “How can he when he does not even speak our tongue? But he says that our customs are bad; and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad" (page 129). This happens in chapter twenty when Okonkwo and Obierika are talking about the arrival of the colonialists. What I got from this chapter was that Obierika seems to strongly suggest the authors opinion about the new missionaries and overall colonialism. The "white man" disregarded the Igbo way of life. This reminds me of a Ted talk I watched in my other class. It was this man that had an idea of "one laptop per child" and he was basically just doing a sales pitch about how children in countries like Cambodia, Ethiopia, Peru and other countries with limited resources and he thought he would try to give these countries laptops. Though these laptops had English keyboards, Nicholas Negroponte assumed that all these children would learn English and type and learn to program in English, not their native language. So this is interesting because us as Americans associate happiness with technology and money and we assume that smaller villages that don't have this technology are unhappy and struggling with life.