Principle and practice: The logic of cultural violence in Achebe's Things Fall Apart

College Literature, Winter 1999 by Hoegberg, David

The phrase "cultural violence" need not refer only to violence between people of different cultures. It can also refer to violence that is encouraged by the beliefs and traditions of a given culture and practiced upon its own members. "Cultural violence" used in this sense would include ritual sacrifices, punishments for crimes, and other kinds of communally sanctioned violence. Often, the communal sanction given to acts of violence springs from unexamined assumptions and contradictions within the culture and shared by a majority of its members. This insight, I will argue, is a major theme of Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel, Things Fall Apart, one of the most influential fictional statements on violence in a colonial setting. Although Achebe powerfully criticizes the violence of British colonial practices, the British do not enter the picture until after Achebe has explored the internal workings of Igbo culture. The main character, Okonkwo, is frequently violent, but Achebe's statements about the relations of culture to violence are better seen in the actions and beliefs of the group as a whole. Since the majority of Igbo in the novel tend to be less violent than Okonkwo, those forms of violence they do condone and enact are especially revealing of the widespread cultural forces that foster violence. I will argue that two of these cultural forces are particularly important to Achebe. One is the community's tendency to forget, selectively and temporarily, certain defining principles of its culture, so that contradictions arise between specific practices and general beliefs. The other is what Simon Gikandi has called "the Achilles heel in the Igbo epistemology," that is, "its blindness [to], or refusal to contemplate, its own ethnocentrism" (1991, 38). Even violence internal to the culture is often conceptualized in terms of ethnocentric distinctions between insiders and outsiders, borders and border crossings.

In one scene early in the novel, Achebe shows the Igbos' capacity for selfconsciousness regarding violence within their culture when he reveals that some violent traditions have been changed. After Okonkwo pays his fine for breaking the Week of Peace, one of the oldest men in the village reflects on the way things used to be done. Ezeudu says, "in the past a man who broke the peace was dragged on the ground through the village until he died. But after a while this custom was stopped because it spoiled the peace which it was meant to preserve" (1959, 33). This brief passage leads us to several important issues at stake in the novel. We are told that the custom of killing offenders changed not because of a gradual and unconscious evolution, not because of personal favoritism toward an offender, but because the practice violated a principle the people wanted to uphold: "because it spoiled the peace which it was meant to preserve." This tells us that the change was conscious and was based on an analysis of the congruence between principle and practice. Since the very existence of the Week of Peace expresses the principle that violence is an affront to the earth, the punishment for violations needs to express the same general principle or there is contradiction. In this case, violence resulted from an unexamined contradiction that was later revealed and rooted out. At a certain point, it occurred to enough people that it made no sense to enforce a rule of non-violence with violence. What are the conditions of possibility for such a cultural change? First, a majority of people must have the freedom and the desire to analyze their traditions for moral and logical consistency. Second, they must see the general principles involved as more valuable than specific rituals or traditions. A culture that already has some violent traditions will tend to keep them as long as its highest priority is the preservation of tradition for its own sake. Finally, people must believe that changing inconsistent traditions makes them stronger as a people, that cultural change is not the same as cultural decay. In the case of the Week of Peace punishment, the change in the tradition is really toward a more perfect expression of the principle behind the tradition.

This example shows that in the not-too-distant past the conditions for questioning and constructive change of violent traditions were present in Igbo society. We might even say that there was a tradition of analyzing and adjusting certain traditions within the culture. If the Igbo, as depicted in the novel, fail to make changes in other areas where there are contradictions between principle and practice, then, it cannot be because such change is impossible. Through this brief example, Achebe establishes that violence is not an inherent feature of Igbo society or a necessary consequence of its religious beliefs. If change is always possible, then we must look at other cases of violence in the novel in terms of what forces inhibit or encourage analysis and change.

One of the most important examples of culturally sanctioned violence is the killing of Ikemefuna. Most critics agree that it is a mistake for Okonkwo to participate in this killing because of his special relationship to Ikemefuna (Taylor 1983, 20-21), but many fail to ask why the oracle and elders sanction this violence in the first place (Udumukwu 1991, 333; Obiechina 1991, 35). Some critics attempt to justify the killing as part of accepted practice among the Igbo (Rhoads 1993, 68; Cobham 1991, 95), and argue that condemnations of the killing inappropriately apply Western standards of humanism (Opata 1987, 75-76; Hawkins 1991, 83). Few seem to have noticed that the novel itself teaches us how to critique this incident on the basis of principle. The crime for which the people of Mbaino are punished is the killing of a woman from Umuofia. If there is a general principle operating here and not simply a policy of selfish revenge, it would be that villagers should not kill aliens or visitors in their midst. For Umuofia to punish this crime by taking a boy from Mbaino into their midst and killing him is to violate the very principle they would appear to be enforcing, thereby spoiling the peace they meant to preserve (Wright 1990, 79; Innes 1990, 29).