Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

“Things Fall Apart,” by Chinua Achebe is very different from other books. First of all, the structure in witch it’s tragedy is develop is very close to real life, what in my personal opinion it makes it much more interesting. This book is about a men named Okonkwo, and it tells two separate stories about him. But more than telling a story about an individual, this book is about his tribe, and all the traditions, values, and the culture itself. Okonkwo is from a tribe in Nigeria, and that tribe has an oral culture. The book is published in 1958 so we have to understand the time this story took place and the power, or the lack of it, this tribe had. I didn’t know much more than this about Nigeria, so after reading the first chapter I had some good background about the main character, Okonkwo, that gave me some information about how the culture of the tribe is. This chapter talks about his family, the environment he lived in, and Okonkwo himself.

The second story of this book is about missionaries that came to Nigeria, to their “territories” and changed everything in those people’s life. They built churches, schools to read and write, and the culture of the tribe changes drastically. The first thing that comes to my mind when reading about the tribe and the oral culture is the way language is preserved. In tribes like this, there are no books you can read if you want to find out about the past of the tribe. You need to go to the elders of the group, because they are the only ones having the knowledge.

            

            The question is coming to my mind is why do cultures like this wants to stay oral cultures instead of becoming literal cultures and preserve all the tribe’s history much easier? Other question I have is how would a culture and the history of a country, tribe, or nation change when it goes from an oral culture to a literal culture? There are still tribes about the world that are oral and refuse to progress in their communication. For me, this is the same thing as technologies. There are people that refuse to use smartphones, computers, and other digital technologies because they believe that would only ruin their culture and change their lives is a bad way. The question we all have to consider is how big of an improvement is to use technologies (writing included), and how has the culture changed since we started using those.