![]() They're being saved! Those dumb Africans need help from their white betters! When the book was written it was not at all likely that young person in the United States (I'm guessing) would feel sorry for an African tribe being converted to Christianity. Your reaction is interesting on a number of levels. As Coetzee would say years later, the African story is for the people of Africa to tell. It is so important as a book because it is written by Chinua Achebe, because he was so familiar with both Nigerian tradition and history as well as Western society. What it does instead is this: it shows the colonists (and, by proxy, religion) as sly and subversive and the native people (or at least those in power) as proud and naive. The book would have sunk into history without a mark. Imagine Okwonko as a hero figure, fighting off the bad white men and saving his tribe. It shows the the tribes people to be just as flawed and with just as much potential to be unlikeable as the colonists. Compare to Heart of Darkness, written over 50 years previously. Secondly, this book was really one of the first to tell the story of African colonisation from the African perspective. Firstly, it was written in a time when people were questioning a lot of things about literature, namely the assumption that the protagonist of a novel should be likeable or easy to relate to and the assumption that a story must go somewhere. Example: Hello.Įxplanation of our link flairs Join our /r/bookclub Don't forget /new! Filter by Flair AMA Weekly Thread Mod PostĪma Check out this week's Thread Calendar
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