Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian novelist and author of Things Fall Apart, a work that relies on family conflicts, the strong role of female gender, and the heritage of the African culture and traditions. However, what I highlight from this novel is the constant conflict of the characters to deal with changes. In the novel, there two main conflicts related to this.
The first one is the fight between the colonization and the desire of the people from Umuofia to keep their traditions and beliefs. On the one hand, language “gives them a sense of belonging and they also use it as a means to preserve their culture and heritage” (Maatla, 2013) that is why parents of the village refuse to send their children to school. What is more, Ibgo society seems to ignore the rest of the world since they never talk about the lands outside their borderlines. On the other hand, the imposition of the Christianism makes characters as Nwoye to reconsider his faith, which was somehow easy because he used to criticize or disagree with some aspects of his culture and also the Ikemefuna’s death on his own father’s hands. “Okonkwo ends up disowning his son, Nwoye after he abandons the Igbo religion.” (Maatla, 2013)
The second fight presented in the novel is Okonkwo´s internal conflict. His unwillingness to express his feelings due to his fear of seeming weak in the eyes of his fellow clan members caused Ikemefuna’s death and by consequence the exile of the entire Okonkwo’s family. What is more, this rough attitude and obsession to refuse his soft (or female) side deprived him of being an important leader in his clan.
I personally believe this novel shows us how changes are part of life and maybe their effects could be whether beneficial for our lives or a devastation, nevertheless, we can only accept them and learn how to cope with them because no matter how much we fight, life will to put our world upside-down anyway.
I just wanted to say that this issue about two different conflicts is something I also wrote about, however, I believed that I was the only one and now I realized it is something that other people can also see. I am glad you also understand it in that way. Moreover, related to your conclusion I personally believe that changes can be hard to accept and sometimes those changes can hurt, but ,as a Disney movie says, you can either run from it or learn from it.
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