Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (First half)

In my opinion Things Fall Apart was a pretty cool story, it really brought me into the African culture and was entertaining to read. It was a little bit hard to keep track of all the characters especially since they all had crazy names that I could barely pronounce. The story was about a village called Umuofia in Africa and there were many characters, the main character being a man named Okonkwo. The story also talks a lot about his father mostly before it gives information about Okonkwo. His father was named Unoka and he was not a very successful man, he was very poor with a wife and kids who barely got enough to eat. The story basically described Unoka as a failure, the only thing he really loved to do and was good at was playing the flute, he would sit on his "mud recliner" and play the flute sometimes all day. He was heavily in debt and owed almost all of his neighbors money and it remained this way until the day he died. Okonkwo on the other hand, did not take after his father too much and was very successful. He was a wealthy farmer who owned two barns which were full of yams and he had three wives. Also unlike his father, he won fame throughout the village at a young age because of a wrestling match that he agreed to against a great wrestler named Amalinze. Amalinze was known as the greatest wrestler and then when Okonkwo decided to compete against him, Okonkwo won the wrestling battle and gained the "greatest wrestler" title from Amalinze.

There were lots of conflicts in the village of Umuofia throughout the story; one of them was another village threatening Umuofia which almost started a war between the two. It was a village called Mbaino who committed a crime against Umuofia. A powerful orator who was always chosen to speak to Umuofia on important occasions informed the village what Mbaino had done. His name was Ogbuefi Ezeugo and he said to the people “Those sons of wild animals have dared to murder a daughter of Umuofia!” When the village people heard this, they were very angered and together they came up with an ultimatum. They asked Mbaino to choose between war or the offer of a young man and a virgin as compensation. Before I found out what the other village’s decision was, the story first went on to talk about how feared Umuofia was by all of its neighbor villages and also that they had the best medicine known as “agadinwayi” which means old woman. I thought it was interesting how they named medicine after old woman, maybe because older people need the medicine the most? Anyway so the Mbaine people wanted to avoid war with the Umuofia village as much as possible so Okonkwo was sent to retrieve a young man and a virgin from the Mbaine village. When he came back to Umuofia with the two young people, they both then belonged to the Umuofia village. The young virgin was made Ogbuefi’s wife and the young man whose name was Ikemefuna was put under Okonkwo’s supervision and lived in his household for about three years. This village was full of great people in my opinion and I bet after living with Okonkwo, Ikemefuna was more successful than he would have ever been living in the Mbaine village.