Things Fall Apart (District Commissioner Passage Analysis)

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Natania Duhur 11A Stanley     English Homework

Things Fall Apart

Re-read pages 170-171 from ‘Three days later…’ to ‘…knock their shaven heads together.’

How does Achebe’s writing here make you feel about the District Commissioner and his messengers?

During this passage, Okonkwo and the fellow leaders of Umuofia are sent called for and once asked for their part in the burning of the church are handcuffed and sent to prison, where they are maltreated. As a reader one feels compassion fro Okonkwo and his fellow kinsmen and in this essay I will be exploring the ways in which Achebe makes the reader feel about the District Commissioner and his messengers.

The messengers treatment of the clansmen makes the reader feel angry towards them. Their blatant disregard for their superiors’ wishes ‘to treat the men with respect’ is shocking as they take matters into their own hands. Their saluting and acknowledgement of the District Commissioner’s wishes is hypocritical as they neglect this and this disrespect is unusual as the Igbo people value men with status and would do anything to disrespect them. As the prison barber ‘took down his razor and shaved off all the hair on men’s heads’, this is a similar incidence to when Mr. Kiaga tells the outcasts to ‘shave off the mark of [their] heathen belief.’ Even though it is normal for an Igbo man to shave their head in this incidence it is symbolic, as it is the white man who shaves their head without permission almost as if he is stripping Okonkwo and the leaders’ of their Igbo rights.

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The mocking of their chief status is also infuriating. ‘We see that every pauper wears the anklet of title in Umuofia.’ In their ignorance, they do not know that to be called ‘agbala’, a woman or a man of no title is an insult and only successful men can carry the anklet of title. This complete contempt for their culture, even in ignorance is angering. Okonkwo has ‘thrown himself [into achieving title] like one possessed,’ and as a reader seeing that struggle and then seeing the messengers ridicule the leaders is sad.

‘At night the messengers came ...

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