We, The Foreigners

I’m struck by the “foreign” images in Things Fall Apart for which we have counterparts in our own culture that do not strike us as unusual, irrational, or primitive. 

Okonkwo’s tribe, the Igbo, display total acceptance of their Oracle and the priestess’ commands to kill a boy and take a girl away from her family to a cave overnight.  In the United States today, many people display total acceptance and readily obey quack physicians and prank callers on one hand, and the governmental power of the draft and military orders on the other hand.

Justified beating is excused in the native village.  We say beating cannot be excused, yet our society often “looks the other way” when it happens in the military, during law enforcement, or among vigilante groups.

Okonkwo and his relatives practice both polygamy and monogamy.  In the US, we sanction the official status of persons of the opposite sex share living quarters (POSSLQ’s), and accept several such out-of-wedlock sexual relationships over the length of a person’s life, and do not find it unusual for the same individuals to also have one or more monogamous marriages.

Superstition and polytheism are part of the villagers’ beliefs, becoming mingled with Christianity among the converts.  In our country today we have hospitals, hotels, and other public buildings without rooms and floors numbered thirteen due to superstition, an Episcopal bishop who also practices Zen Buddhism, and many who adhere to a wide range of new age religions.  We generally shrug off these ideologies, even among self-identified Christians.

The Igbo have a secret male society and exclusive meeting house, like current US all-male clubs, fraternities, and some Native American kiva traditions.

I’m also struck by our typically Eurocentric judgment of the native Africans’ culture as simple, without ethics, and violent.  Achebe’s portrayal of the Igbo challenges these stereotypes in several ways.

The natives’ oral culture seems too simple to those of us raised in a written culture, yet we as DTC students study how our computer-literate generation is now cycling back to orality with the advancement of the Internet.

Rather than a simplified social structure, the Igbo have an intricate hierarchy, and official titles similar to our governmental, educational, religious, social, and corporate organizations.

In a different way than our combined governments now provide welfare, social security, Medicare, and Medicaid, Okonkwo’s clan takes care of its own, displaying high ethical standards(75).

These Africans place ethical priority on the higher good of all over justice of the individual (74).  Our schools educate the middle eighty percent of students well for the good of society, often unfairly setting aside the individual needs of the top and bottom ten percent of individuals who under- or over-achieve.

We’re appalled by the unethical abandonment of twins among this tribe, yet many in our present culture support more violent means of dealing with unwanted babies through abortion.

Guns and a cannon are initially used only non-violently, in ceremony, by the Igbo, until there’s an accidental killing (74).  Our own society has high violent usages of guns today.

These images should shatter our stereotypical views and widen our fields of comparison when we experience “foreign” cultures first hand--in our travels abroad, as well as in our personal relationships with those from other cultures here at home.