This article examines ‘community’ as a cosmological category through Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. One study has noted that the novel ‘occupies an important place in critical as well as cultural discourse because it inaugurated a long and continuing tradition of inquiry into the problematic relations between the West and the nations of the Third World that were once European colonies’ (Okpewho 2003: 3). Further, Things Fall Apart reflects changes in the nature of indigenous religion and underscores the erosion of some traditional religio-cultural values in the face of an aggressively evangelical and external religion. At the time, Western missionary religion had in several senses become an extension of colonialism. The initial encounters between the Ibo traditional community and what Isidore Okpewho (2003: 8) describes as ‘the encroaching British colonial presence’ brought into tragic confrontation some of the highly valued ideals of Ibo society. One of these is the African sense of community. What is this African understanding of community and in what way does Achebe's novel enable an understanding of how the Western Christian missionary enterprise affected this critical ontological value of traditional society?
Community as an important cosmological feature with salvific connotations is strongly present in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The novel has been acknowledged, and in my opinion with veracity, as one of the greatest African literary works of all time. Achebe weaves into the novel African cosmological ideas and discusses the tense encounters between those ideas and cultural values on the one hand and certain values of historic mission Christianity on the other. In this essay, I delineate community as one of the main themes of African traditional religious culture as represented by the Ibo primal world and how the changes brought on through the Western Christian missionary enterprise eventually led to the disintegration of certain traditions. The main character, Okonkwo, was himself driven by self-interest and ambition to defy the supernatural powers of his society resulting in very tragic consequences for himself and his family. We will highlight the deep-seated cultural beliefs of African traditions and demonstrate how Achebe innovatively helps us not only to understand African cosmological ideas as represented by the sense of community but also some of the difficulties and ruptures arising out of the encounter with Western ideas and Christianity. These are developments with which Africans are still dealing almost two centuries after the first Western missionaries arrived on the continent.
Okonkwo is the main character of the novel under study here. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, although written within an Ibo traditional context, is a novel with deep insights into African traditional worldviews or cosmological ideas. An important part of the African religious ontology, we will note below, has to do with its strong sense of community, a category that suffered severe strain under the individualistic approach that Western missions took to Christian evangelisation. Okonkwo, to refer to Okpewho's work again, ‘sets himself with such single-minded fierceness against the encroaching colonial power’ that he runs foul of the ideal of community cherished by his people (Okpewho 2003: 8). African theologian Kwesi A. Dickson (1984: 62) describes the inseparability of the sacred and secular in this traditional understanding of community:
A society is in equilibrium when its customs are maintained, its goals attained and the spirit powers given regular and adequate recognition. Members of society are expected to live and act in such a way as to promote society's well-being; to do otherwise is to court disaster not only for the actor but also for society as a whole. Any act that detracts from the soundness of society is looked upon with disfavor, and society takes remedial measures to reverse the evil consequences set in motion.
A traditional ‘week of peace’ observed annually in most traditional societies prior to the celebration of religious festivals had as custom demanded been imposed on the inhabitants of Umuofia. The strong African sense of community that brought together the living, the dead, and the yet unborn, means that individual infractions, as Dickson notes, could have communal consequences. Okonkwo therefore broke a sacred custom when he beat up his youngest wife, Ojiugo, in that week. She had gone to plait her hair at a friend's house and did not return early enough to cook the afternoon meal. When she returned Okonkwo beat her ‘very heavily’. In his anger he had forgotten that it was the Week of Peace. The rest of the story is best told in Achebe's (1959: 30) words:
Okonkwo's neighbors heard his wife crying and sent their voices over the compound walls to ask what was the matter. Some of them came over to see for themselves. It was unheard of to beat somebody during the sacred week.
Before it was dusk Ezeani, who was the priest of the earth goddess, Ani, called on Okonkwo in his obi. Okonkwo brought out kola nut and placed it before the priest. ‘Take away your kola nut. I shall not eat in the house of a man who has no respect for our gods and ancestors.’
‘ … Listen to me,’ he said when Okonkwo had spoken. ‘You are not a stranger in Umuofia. You know as well as I do that our forefathers ordained that before we plant any crops in the earth we should observe a week in which a man does not say a harsh word to his neighbor. We live in peace with our fellows to honor our great goddess of the earth without whose blessing our crops will not grow. You have committed a great evil.’ He brought down his staff heavily on the floor. ‘Your wife was at fault, but even if you came into your obi and found her lover on top of her, you would still have committed a great evil to beat her.’ His staff came down again. ‘The evil you have done can ruin the whole clan. The earth goddess whom you have insulted may refuse to give us her increase, and we shall all perish.’
At the center of this process stands the priest, the intermediary between deity and mortal. There is no questioning of his position, no doubt about his authority, no possibility of his denial … there is no ambiguity or blurring of responsibilities and significances. The progress of the clan, divinely guided and humanly effected through the collective obedience of the clanspeople, is distinct and emphatic.
The people of Mbaino, a nearby village, had murdered ‘a daughter of Umuofia’. Achebe's description of the victim as a ‘daughter of Umuofia’ was an indication that although an individual had been murdered the tragedy was being interpreted in communal terms. So rather than refer to the victim of homicide as the wife of Ogbuefi Udo, Ogbuefi Ezeugo, who was conveying the sad news to the community, referred to her as ‘daughter of Umuofia’. At the end of the village meeting an emissary was dispatched to Mbaino giving them an ultimatum to choose either between war or the offer of a young man and a virgin as compensation (Achebe 1959: 11). Okonkwo of Umuofia, one of the most feared men in the village, was the one who was sent to Mbaino to bring the options to the people. Two days later, he returned home with two symbols of reconciliation, a young virgin and a lad of fifteen years old called Ikemefuna. The young virgin went to Ogbuefi Udo to replace his murdered wife and Ikemefuna grew up in Okonkwo's household as his future was being considered by the oracles. When it came, Ikemefuna was to be offered as a sacrifice to atone for the shedding of innocent blood by his people, the people of Mbaino (Achebe 1959: 12).
We have already noted the fact that Okonkwo attempted to place his personal interest ahead of that of the community and we see an instance of this at one of the major incidents in Things Fall Apart, the killing of Ikemefuna. Okonkwo with whom Ikemefuna had stayed had taken part in the killing of the child against sound warning. Ogbuefi Ezeudu the oldest man in Okonkwo's quarter of Umuofia and who was ‘accorded great respect in all the clan’ had warned Okonkwo: ‘That boy calls you father. Do not have a hand in his death’ (ibid.: 57). Unfortunately he took part in it out of egoistic interest:
As the man who cleared his throat drew up and raised his machete, Okonkwo looked away. He heard the blow. The pot fell and broke in the sand. He heard Ikemefuna cry, ‘My father, they have killed me!’ as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his machete and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak. (Ibid.: 61)
You know very well, Okonkwo, that I am not afraid of blood; … If I were you I would have stayed at home. What you have done will not please the Earth. It is the kind of action for which the goddess wipes out whole families. (Ibid.: 67)
In other words, the consequences of Okonkwo's religious, social, and moral indiscretions had mystical consequences for his community but he did not always consider those wider implications of his actions. One biblical example here is the story of Achan in Joshua 7. Israel was routed in war by the people of Ai and this defeat coming on the heels of a major victory of Jericho was hard to take. It revealed then that Achan had taken some of the ‘devoted things’ for his personal use from the conquered city of Ai. Although he acted alone, the trouble that came with it affected all of Israel through defeat in war. When Achan was found out, Joshua was unambiguous about the consequences of his action: ‘Why have you brought this trouble on us? The Lord will bring trouble on you today’ (Joshua 7: 25). Consequently Achan and his whole family were stoned to death. It was a typical case of the fathers eating sour grapes and setting the teeth of their children on edge.
In African philosophical thought, religion and life form an integral whole. The core ingredients of religion and its defining characteristics include: belief, worship, faith, sacrifice, transcendence, doctrine, offering, mediation, pilgrimage, prayer, community, creeds, icons and images, symbols and other relational elements, and devotions to sacred objects and practices. ‘Transcendent reality’ and ‘community’ remain the two elements around which the others revolve. At one end religion presupposes the existence of a transcendent unseen realm, the source of life, power, comfort, sustenance, and strength. At the other end is an earthly realm of humans associated with weakness, limitation, powerlessness, helplessness, search for meaning, and ultimately death. The two realms are engaged through revelations and responses as humans search for salvation in a precarious world. Religious groups constitute community in its quintessential form because shared aspirations for deliverance from the human predicament throws people together. Indeed in primal cultures, such as those of Africa and Australasia, the sacred and secular realms of existence remain inseparable and the key word is ‘participation’.
Religious community here potentially includes the living and the transcendent ancestor who may be physically dead but remains an active participant in the religious life of the community. Thus one way to discern the integrated cosmology of Africa is the African sense of community which includes both the living and what John Mbiti refers to as the living-dead, the ancestors on account of the recognition that they participate in the lives of the living as custodians of private and public morality. Writing at the height of the development of African theology as an academic discipline, one of its early stalwarts, John S. Pobee of Ghana, referred to sensus communis as an important part of the African worldview. Whereas Descartes wrote for Westerners when he said cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am – the ontology of the traditional African tends to be cognatus ergo sum – I am related by blood, therefore I exist or I exist because I belong to a family (Pobee 1979: 49).
Thus ethnophilosophy, it has been said, rejects two spheres of Western philosophy, namely logic and individuality. European individuality which was partly evident in the nature of Christian practices mediated in the missionary era is thus in opposition to the integral feature of African philosophy, which is communality (Deacon 2003: 98). This theme of sensus communis is so fundamental to African traditional life and existence that it had been commented on by John S. Mbiti (1969: 2) in his classic, African Religions and Philosophy:
Traditional religions are not primarily for the individual but for his community of which he is part. … To be human is to belong to the whole community, and to do so involves participating in the beliefs, ceremonies, rituals and festivals of the community, and in traditional society there are no irreligious people. A person cannot detach himself from the religion of his group, for to do so is to be severed from his roots, his foundation, his context of security, his kinships and the entire group of those who make him aware of his own existence. To be without one of these corporate elements of life is to be out of the whole picture.
We learn from Chinua Achebe that in African societies, ‘proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten’ (Achebe 1959: 7). There are proverbs and other evidences in the sources of African tradition that model a communal conception of society but there are also many other proverbs and evidences that imply ‘a moderate kind of communalism (communitarianism), the model that acknowledges the intrinsic worth and dignity of the individual human person and recognizes individuality, individual responsibility and individual initiative and effort’ (Gyekye 1988: 54). The Akan of Ghana say for example itsir wopam no nkorkor, that is, ‘destiny must be pursued by individual effort’, and Okonkwo did just that. The fear of failure and of being maligned as an agbala, a non achiever as people referred to his late father, created in him a deep passion to succeed even at the expense of wider interests:
During the planting season Okonkwo worked daily on his farms from cock-crow until the chickens went to roost. He was a very strong man and rarely felt fatigue. But his wives and young children were not as strong, and so they suffered. But they dared not complain openly. (Achebe 1959: 13)
The tragic story of Okonkwo illustrates the fact that however powerful a person may be in traditional African society, he or she lives life first as a member of a community and next, as an individual (Sawyerr 1994: 117). To that end, Laurenti Magesa writes that the realisation of sociability or relationships in daily living by the individual and the community is the central moral and ethical imperative of African religion. All that takes away from the community could be disastrous:
From the perspective of African Religion, then, illness, poverty and other calamities point to a moral disorder in relationships, from the most elementary in the family to the most complex in the society. If the family, lineage, and clan enjoy good health and relative prosperity, particularly when the birth rate is good and the children survive to adulthood, it is believed that there is a good rapport in the network of relationships. The ancestors are happy, the vital force is strong, and there is harmony in the land and in creation. (Magesa 1997: 81)
Life, in the sense of abundant life encapsulating good health, fruitfulness, economic abundance, the power of procreation, and cosmic harmony are at the center of the African existence. Thus when Okoye went to visit Unoka in the opening pages of Things Fall Apart, the first ritual act performed by the host was to present a disc of kola to his guest who thanked him adding, ‘he who brings kola brings life’ (Achebe 1959: 6). As he broke the kola, we are told, ‘Unoka prayed to their ancestors for life and health, and for protection against their enemies’ (ibid.). Elsewhere in the novel, we encounter the fact that even at the personal and domestic levels the ancestors must be acknowledged as the ultimate sources of prosperity:
Okonkwo's prosperity was visible in his household. He had a large compound enclosed by a thick wall of red earth … At the opposite end of the compound was a shed for the goats, and each wife built a small attachment to her hut for the hens. Near the barn was a small house, the ‘medicine house’ or shrine where Okonkwo kept the wooden symbols of his personal god and of his ancestral spirits. He worshipped them with sacrifices of kola nut, food and palm-wine, and offered prayers to them on behalf of himself, his three wives and eight children. (Achebe 1959: 14)
One of the high points of African religious life is the celebration of festivals in recognition of the gods and ancestors. These festivals are a communal affair and they are usually related to how people eke out a living. Festivals enable communities to acknowledge their dependence on the gods and ancestors for survival. The Feast of the New Yam in Umuofia was therefore, as described by Achebe, ‘an occasion for giving thanks to Ani, the earth goddess and the source of all fertility’:
The Feast of the New Yam was held every year before the harvest began, to honor the earth goddess and the ancestral spirits of the clan. New yams could not be eaten until some had first been offered to these powers. (Ibid.: 38)
The relationship between Ani the earth goddess and the ancestors is seen in the fact that she was seen by the people of Umuofia as being ‘in close communion with the departed fathers of the clan whose bodies had been committed to earth.’ It is the earth that receives the bodies of the departed elders of the clan and therefore the earth is sacred and must be honoured both as the direct source of economic survival and the custodian of the mortal remains of the departed. That the New Yam Festival was an occasion to bring together in communion the living and the dead is seen in the fact that community is the focus of the celebrations as explained by Achebe:
The New Year must begin with tasty, fresh yams and not the shriveled and fibrous crop of the previous year. All cooking pots, calabashes and fibrous wooden bowls were thoroughly washed, especially the wooden mortar in which yam was pounded. Yam fufu and vegetable soup was the chief food in the celebration. So much of it was cooked that, no matter how heavily the family ate or how many friends and relatives they invited from neighboring villages, there was always a large quantity of food left over at the end of the day. … The New Yam festival was thus an occasion for joy throughout Umuofia. And every man whose arm was strong, as the Ibo people say, was expected to invite large numbers of guests from far and wide (Achebe, 1959: 36–37).
Christian conversion which began with the arrival of Western missionaries in Iboland
[…] had caused a considerable stir in the village of Mbanta where Okonkwo had taken refuge among his mother's kinsmen following an act of homicide. During the period of exile and back at home in Umuofia, his own son Nwoye had embraced Christianity and in the process virtually denounced his biological father Okonkwo. (Achebe 1959: 144)
‘Blessed is he who forsakes his father and his mother for my sake’, he intoned. ‘Those that hear my words are my father and my mother.’ (Ibid.: 152)
The first problem has been cited in studies on the interface between African traditional religion and the Christian faith as accounting for the reason why a number of African Christians combined their faith with traditional resources of supernatural succour. Although the gods were represented in missionary evangelical messages as powerless, missionary Christianity itself did little to help families respond to the sorts of fears and anxieties that drove people to consult with shrine gods. At points new converts, wanting to prove the potency of their faith, even invaded villages and ‘boasted openly that all the gods were dead and impotent and that they were prepared to defy them by burning all their shrines’ (ibid.: 155). With the second problem, the presence of Christianity in denominational form and representations split people and community in different ways especially through the celebrations of Holy Communion. The non-acceptance of one group of denominational Christians at the communion table of other groups remains an area where Christian practice seemed to go severely against traditional religious and cultural practices.
The missionary approach to conversion was through the quarantine of Christians in ‘Salems’, that is, Christian enclaves with traditional communities that separated families from each other. There are three things that have contributed to destroying African communal life and fellow feeling. The first is capitalism, which promotes unhealthy competition, rivalry, and envy because of its profit motif. African communities have been ripped apart and set against each other either because their environment has been destroyed or because there were disagreements over property ownership and, therefore, who should be the beneficiaries of mining and forestry royalties. The second is colonialism, which created artificial boundaries on the continent leading to the internecine ethnic conflicts and cleansing that have come to be associated with countries like Rwanda and Burundi. The third, we noted earlier, are aspects of missionary activity that introduced denominationalism among Africans leading to situations in which people, who lived together in the same community before Christian evangelisation, began to look at each other as religiously different and therefore enemies.
In relation to the third point above, one of the most perplexing theological and ecclesiological moments of my life and ministry occurred when a group of us were refused Holy Communion at an Anglican Church ordination service in Ghana. We have come to accept the Catholic position of treating all non-Catholics as non-communicants but not the Anglicans with whom we train in the same ecumenical seminary. On completion of seminary training, a group of year-mates agreed to be present at each other's ordination services because they took place on different Sundays in the various churches represented at the seminary. The sponsoring churches of the seminary are Methodist, Presbyterian, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, and Anglican and good numbers of private students from the Pentecostal/Charismatic and African Independent Church streams of the faith. The last person in the row of ordinations was our Anglican colleague. The service of ordination was elaborate and the vows were moving and challenging. During offering time, we joined family and friends to dance to African gospel choruses as we went pew by pew to place our offerings in the collection bowls provided near the Altar. The service concluded with Holy Communion. However, after the consecration of the elements, as we looked forward to sharing at the Lord's Table together – and this is something we had done together weekly at the Seminary – the Presiding Bishop shattered our hopes and joy with the following announcement: ‘If you are not an Anglican, do not step here for communion.’
George Hunsinger has observed that ‘no point of division has been more disastrous than the disunity surrounding the Eucharist, the very sacrament of unity itself’ (Hunsinger 2008: 22). In the seminary, we had studied, prayed, played, and eaten together with our colleague who was being ordained. It is very African for age-mates to eat together from the same bowl in the village ‘family house’, as we encounter several times in Things Fall Apart. As people who had been brought up in a tradition of communal eating, the question that confronted us was this: ‘If we were able to congregate around secular food with our colleague in Seminary, why could we not eat together at the Lord's Table?’ Where lay the ‘one body in Christ’ and the ‘sharing in his blood’ that accompanied the words of institution used by the bishop during consecration of the elements moments earlier? These questions remain unanswered as we find similar situations in churches around Africa. Quoting Ghanaian theologian Mercy Oduyoye (2002: 34):
From the perspective of Africa, an interpretation of the Eucharist that highlights aspects of sacrifice is one that will touch people's spirituality in such a way as to affect their lives. The victory that comes out of sharing what really costs us something, is for Africans a living experience. This is our path to triumph over exploitation and domination, and the way to replace charity with justice.
Communion shared through meals takes place among people who are, or wish to be, on peaceful and friendly terms. It is an extension of the everyday societal etiquette of the Akan, the Kikuyu and other African peoples, and is extended not only to members of one's family or friends but even to the causal caller or the stranger.
The inability of the Christian Church to sustain the African sense of community and translate it fully in Christian terms and fellowship has led to a disconnection that has manifested in places like Rwanda and Burundi, leading even members of the same church to fight one another in the name of ethnic superiority. In his moving book, Finding Forgiveness amidst a Pile of Bones, John Rucyahana, who is Bishop of Rwanda, writes that in 1994, at least 1,117,000 souls were massacred in the terrible genocide in Rwanda in Central Africa. The role of the Churches in the genocide is what leads me to retell the story here:
The amount of pain from sorrow or guilt in Rwanda is inconceivable to those who have not been here. And the fact that so much of this pain came through the churches and other religious institutions have only made matters worse. To whom do the people turn for hope when they have been betrayed by the very ones who claim to represent God's love? During the genocide, there were pastors who killed people in their congregations; priests who bull-dozed their churches on top of the people who were hiding in them, pleading for mercy; nuns who set fire to church buildings holding people begging for their lives; and ministers who lured their congregations to their deaths with the promise of protection. Can you imagine the pain and hopelessness that this generates in people? (Rucyahana 2007: xvii)
African theology often emphasises the communal or social aspects of salvation. In this theology, which is founded on both Scripture and African religio-cultural traditions, to be delivered from sin into fullness of life is to be freed and empowered to live a community-centred life. The restoration of the community is also present in the Christian understanding of salvation as a process of reconciliation with God. Such reconciliation also brings healing. Two key biblical texts, one from the prophecies of the Isaiah, and the other from St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, stimulate my thinking as I reflect on the theme of the Christian sense of community as encapsulating healing and restoration.
Many people will come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths’ … He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore … let us walk in the light of the Lord. (Isaiah 2∶3–5)
Do not repay anyone evil for evil … If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. (Romans 12: 17)
In whichever context it is being considered the African sense of community is operative only within existing relationships. It is operative when that which is broken, impaired, separated, alienated, hurt, or abused is repaired, brought together, and restored so that an imbalance is corrected. In the powerful words of Isaiah, instruments of destruction are converted into tools for production; nations abandon plans for war and shalom prevail. It is in reconciliation that God's image in humankind is refurbished. Humanity gets restored both in God and in community. When it occurs, reconciliation calls for celebration. In most parts of Africa, meals and drinks may be shared, however informally, or ‘kola nuts’ may be split to signify the successful arbitration of disputes, completion of risky ventures or even to welcome people, to signify the existence and celebration of peace and harmony.
We find in this story that one thing that is very crucial for our understanding of the essence of community in an African understanding is the belief in the sanctity of human life. Human life is sacred because it is given by God, who also makes people moral beings with a sense of right and wrong. The shedding of innocent blood, as Okonkwo did, was therefore considered an abomination that carried catastrophic consequences. It is in the light of this belief that some have attributed the worsening precarious economic conditions of Africa, including natural catastrophes, to the wanton shedding of blood during the many civil and ethnic wars that have plagued the continent. The African philosophy of life and existence, although it makes room for the individual, tends to follow the philosophy of ‘cognatus ergo sum,’ that is, ‘I am because I belong.’ The individual can only say, ‘I am because we are.’ There is, therefore, a complete repudiation of ethical egoism in Africa's theory of existence. In the context of this communal theory of existence, sin, among other things, creates disharmony and brings about the disintegration of the society.
What is implied here by the sanctity of human life and the strong sense of community is synonymous with the implications of the human person as having been ‘created in God's image’. It is at once in God and in belonging to the brotherhood or sisterhood of all people that a person's true identity is located. As with the case of Okonkwo, Cain is not only alienated from God and from people after murdering his brother Abel, but also his world is completely broken. The curse placed on him from the world of transcendence by Yahweh meant that the land will not yield and above all, he became a fugitive. For as long as that status of being under a curse was not reversed through the appropriate reconciliatory measures, Cain was not whole.
If the experiences of the biblical Achan and Cain and the Ibo Okonkwo are anything to go by, then we have in both the biblical and traditional contexts invitations to see one's personal interests and abilities and pursue them in the light of the good of the whole community. In the words of St. Paul as he called on the faithful at Philippi to emulate the example of the Lord Jesus Christ, he admonished: ‘Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.’
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