“Things Fall Apart- A cultural study”

Siddharth G. Desai

Roll no. - 07

SEM - IV

Paper no.E-E-405-D

Year – 2012

Topic: “Things Fall Apart- A cultural study”

Submitted to Dr. Dilip Barad

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University.

Albert Chinualumoga Achebe is a well-known African writer whose “Things Fall Apart” is a famous novel in the African literature which in the African literature which talks about the Igbo people and their culture. This novel was first published in 1959. Any culture represents its people rituals, customs, and way of living etc. There are many cultures in this word. Various cultures have their different belief systems and rituals. The Igbo culture has also its various belief system and rituals.

            Thing fall apart is all about Igbo culture and its conflict with the Christian missionaries. The colonial people take the way of living of Igbo people as completely uncivilized. It is a matter of perspective or point of view. Here, the fault of the colonial people is that they have misinterpreted the Igbo people and their culture. They have failed to understand these people.

            Things Fall apart, which has been translated into fifty different languages, with more than 8 million copies in print worldwide, this celebrated to Greek tragedy for its straightforward, searing power, acute dynamics and potent sense of inevitability. Deemed “perhaps the most memorable account in English of an African culture and the impact upon it of white European encroachment, “Things Fall Apart” explores the traumatizing effects of British colonialism on a small Nigerian village at the turn of the nineteenth century. However, Achebe resists the temptation to portray his tribal past in romantic or sentimental terms; rather, he adopts a “realistic “approach in the hope of counting the stereotypical representations of indigenous Nigerians and other Africans made familiar to western- and indeed to many African- readers in such works as Joyce Cary’s “Mr. Johnson” (1939). Things Fall Apart played a major role in African self-understanding; it became “the first novel by an African writer to be included in the required syllabus for African secondary schools, not only in Nigeria but throughout the English – speaking parts of the African continent. Achebe’s first novel also explores what a might be called the “politics of point of view” and the problem of alterity or “Otherness” the difficulty, if not impossibility, of completely imagining one individual of culture in terms of another.”