Culture in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Trying to avoid lending authority to any one culture over others, current advocates of multiculturalism generally emphasize the appreciation of difference among cultures. Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina today provide horrifying evidence that difference can have precisely the opposite impact. On the one hand, difference can be necessary to national self-confidence, but, on the other, it can stir destructive tribal or national pride. Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart represents the cultural roots of the Igbos in order to provide self-confidence, but at the same time he refers them to universal principles which vitiate their destructive potential. Seeing his duty as a writer in a new nation as showing his people the dignity that they lost during the colonial period, he sets out to illustrate that before the European colonial powers entered Africa, the Igbos “had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity” (1973, 8). Achebe, however, cannot achieve his goal merely by representing difference; rather he must depict an Igbo society which moderns can see as having dignity. What is remarkable about his Igbos is the degree to which they have achieved the foundations of what most people seek today—democratic institutions, tolerance of other cultures, a balance of male and female principles, capacity to change for the better or to meet new circumstances, a means of redistributing wealth, a viable system of morality, support for industriousness, an effective system of justice, striking and memorable poetry and art. Achebe apppears to have tested Igbo culture against the goals of modern liberal democracy and to have set out to show how the Igbo meet those standards.