Chinua Achebe / Buchi Emecheta
In Buchi Emecheta's book, The Joys of Motherhood, colonialism is already instituted and through the main character, Nnu Ego, we are able to see what post-colonialism looks like from a woman's perspective. The reader has the knowledge of hindsight and what colonialism did in Africa, the major impact of it, however, the story that Emecheta creates completely avoids anachronism. The characters in Emecheta's book only know what they know is going on in their society at that time; they don't seem to know what we know now about colonialism. Chinua Achebe's book, Things Fall Apart, on the other hand, tells the tale of life before colonialism and when the white man came to a Nigerian village and the events that ensued after and how life changed for Nigerians. We understand through reading Achebe's work that colonialism came into Nigerian culture in a slow but constant way, and the Nigerian culture would never be the same afterwards. The Joys of Motherhood picks up where Achebe left off and gives the reader insight into what took place before colonialism so firmly placed itself in the Igbo community.
In The Joys of Motherhood, we see the importance of gender in the Igbo society. In Nnu Ego's town, polygamy is the custom and the worth of a woman is completely related to her ability to have children, or not to have children. In fact, Nnu Ego's first marriage to Amatokwu fails because of her difficulty to conceive. The customs are definitely limiting in the Igbo culture and we see Nnu Ego struggling to fulfill...
But because Ezinma is female, she cannot function in this capacity. Moreover, even a woman, in a traditional reading of the text would support this notion" (Strong-Leek). The fact that society was patriarchal at the time was especially devastating for women. Moreover, women readers are probable to consider that it is perfectly natural for Ezinma to be unable to follow her father's footsteps because society as a whole has
Chinua Achebe's fifth novel, Anthills of the Savannah, was first published in 1987, some fifteen years after his fourth novel, A Man of the People. In Anthills of the Savannah, Achebe states his abhorrence of any theory of radical transformation of society. "Society is an extension of an individual," he says through Ikem Osodi, his protagonist. "The most we can hope to do with a problematic psyche is to re-form
It is this process of dehumanization of the colonial populations that justifies their own imperialistic behavior. In a similar manner, the human psyche may really be incapable of the kinds of structures and deeds necessary to subjugate a population. In order to do so, then, the colonial population slips into a sense of unreality and justification, accelerating dehumanization in order to allow for colonial subjugation (Fanon, 108, 171-4). Bibliography: Achebe, C.
These converts become zealots and actually kill the village's sacred python. We read no one believed "such a thing could happen" (158). The violence shocks some in the community but not in the way we might expect. Okonkwo wants to chase the missionaries away but the clan overrules his idea is overruled and ostracizes him. This is interesting human behavior. Some clansmen are opposed and others are not and
In the end, he cannot cope with what is happening to him and chooses to deal with things in his own way. Jonathon, too, is a man that is faced with challenges in his community. His outlook is more positive and he chooses to cope by adapting as best as he can. Adapting was something that Okonkwo simply could not do and would not do. These men represent the
They were segregated to a corner of the village close to the Greta Shrine and they were considered to be at the bottom of the societal rung, well below the children. In a sharp contrast, the Christianity disregarded the social order of the Umuofia people and imbibed the Osu into the church, shaving off the tangled hair off their heads and treating them like brothers. They were taken from
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