The viewpoint I decided to use to analyze Things Fall Apart is the postcolonial point of view, partially from it being present fairly often in the story and partially due to an incomplete understanding of how the feminist theory can be applied to said book. I’ll probably show areas where the Ibo culture (the colonized Africans) runs directly counter to the missionaries’ (the colonizers who are capable of insuring obedience) faith, explain how these examples tie into the postcolonial point of view, and hopefully how the results from these events influenced the Ibos. This is kind of simple to show how the missionaries’ relations with the Ibos can be read in a postcolonial light, however I think a disclaimer to the effect that I will still quite likely find a way to incorrectly convey the message is both appropriate and required, but I’ve stayed up too long to write one so I will leave the prior portion of the sentence to apologize for me. Seeing as I’m not from a country that was colonized I’ll not be asking myself the ‘who am I’, ‘how did I develop into who I am’, and ‘to what countries or cultures am I forever tied to’ due to my ancestors not being colonized, to be far they didn’t colonize any poor uncivilized savages either, so I will be looking for how the missionaries asserting the dominance of the Christian faith over the Ibo’s pagan beliefs and practices changed them, including the loss of the violent nature that Okonkwo both embodies and sees as lacking in his kinsmen. While the tribes’ culture had endured and even thrived in their savage conditions it’s followers lacked the ability to prevent the missionaries from coming amongst them to spread Christianity and their culture, and probably if it weren’t for the missionaries acting with restraint then it is quite possible that the murder of the first missionary and the tribes’ actions toward them may have led to them being destroyed along with their culture.
