Okonkwo is the protagonist of Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, a respected wrestling champion, warrior and prosperous farmer in the Igbo village of Umuofia in what is now Nigeria. Determined never to resemble his gentle, failed father, Okonkwo builds his standing on displays of strength, discipline and stern authority over his household, a rigid code of masculinity that serves him well within his own society but leaves him unable to adapt when British colonial administrators and Christian missionaries arrive and begin dismantling Igbo tradition and authority. Okonkwo's tragic inability to bend, ending in his suicide rather than submission to a colonial order he cannot accept, made the novel a foundational text of African literature and a landmark counter-narrative to colonial depictions of pre-colonial African societies. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Narrative RoleSourced to the subject's own accountProtagonist, a respected Igbo leader whose rigid pride cannot survive the arrival of colonial rule 1 Defining TraitSourced to the subject's own accountObsessive fear of appearing weak, modeled against his own father's failures, that drives both his rise and his eventual destruction 1 Narrative role (class)Sourced to the subject's own account FAQs
Why can't Okonkwo's own clansmen bury him?
In the Igbo tradition the novel depicts, suicide is an abomination against the earth goddess, so a man who kills himself becomes unclean to touch; only strangers, never his own people, may cut down and bury his body.
After Okonkwo hangs himself, his friend Obierika has to explain to the District Commissioner why the assembled clansmen will go no further toward the body: taking one's own life offends the earth goddess, and a man who does so may not be touched or buried by his own kin, only by outsiders. The irony closes the novel, since Okonkwo spent his life trying to embody his clan's values and dies in the one way that puts him permanently outside them, his burial left to the same colonial administration whose arrival broke the world he was trying to defend.
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Source Okonkwo (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Sources
1. Okonkwo (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikimedia FoundationLead section
Okonkwo is a famous man in Umuofia. He is a wrestling champion, acclaimed warrior and founder of a prosperous family.
- Character In: Things Fall Apart
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