Chinua Achebes Africa - Essay Example

Chinua Achebe’s Africa Chinua Achebe’s presentation of the land and its peoples in his book Things Fall Apart is a lot different from the ‘traditional’ Western ideas of what Africa is all about. In Achebe’s book, the people spend most of their time engaged in subsistence farming. They live almost entirely on yams, which are considered a man’s crop, but they also ate things that the women grew such as fruits and vegetables. The people in the village are very much like people everywhere else - there are many who work very hard and are respected and there are others, like Okonkwo's father Unoka who would rather spend their time entertaining others.

But the common practice of the tribes was to indiscriminately cut down the virgin forests and exploit the resources of the land in the same way that the white man wanted to exploit the resources of the land. In this way, they aren't really that much different than the white men who come in toward the end of the book. It seems like that is the major message Achebe was trying to get across about the people in his book - that whether they were black or white, they were all the same underneath. Just like the white men, the black men of the village work and struggle to eke out a survival in a harsh land.

It is because the land is so difficult instead of any lack of personal development that forces the society to base social status on each man's success as a farmer. Unoka is proof that a friendlier land that didn't make it so difficult to grow things would have led to a more artistically developed society. Within Unoka’s story is the revelation that the culture has a strong appreciation for art and music, but this is vastly overwhelmed by the constant struggle to survive in a harsh landscape that concedes life only grudgingly.

Achebe also proves that the people of Africa had deeply held traditional beliefs and reasons for doing the things they did just like the white men. A conversation that takes place between the white missionary and another leader of the tribe reveals that the basic underlying morality of Christianity and the traditional morality of the tribes was very similar. The story of Ikemefuna, the child ransom charged by the Umuofia to Mbaino for the murder of one of an Umuofia daughter, seems brutal but there's a certain kind of logical justice involved that sounds very similar to the social rules of Europe's Middle Ages.

One thing that the Africans seem to have better organized is the position of the women. Even though it was considered okay for a man to have more than one wife, which makes it seem like women had no value, women were expected to keep their own gardens and were therefore essentially independent if they wanted to be. If the man went crazy, like Okonkwo did once against one of his wives, she had the right to move back with her family and the rest of society would support her right to do that. Women in the Middle Ages in Europe, or even more recently, didn't have this kind of freedom and had no way to support their children if their husbands didn't do a good job.

This seems like a lot better position than the position white women had even until the 1900s. Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. Print.