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things fall apart

The world in Chinua Achedes novel, Things Fall Apart, was a society in which males had control of everything, and the women had control of nothing. As wives, women were seen as property, rather than as partners to be loved and cherished. The men of the Ibo tribe usually married more than one wife because the more wives, yams, barns, and titles each Ibo man held, the more successful he was considered. These possessions determined a man's social status. An example of a man looking for social status in these ways was Nwakibie, "who had three huge barns, nine wives and thirty children, and the highest but one title which a man could take in the clan"(18). The men controlled the children and women by treating them like slaves. Their only role in the man’s life was to help him achieve a higher stature by working for him. The Ibo tribe’s definition of family was much different than it was in many other parts of the world in the eighteen-hundreds. Okonkwo’s "whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and weakness" (13). The way Achebe described Okonkwo’s family and his tribe showed that in Ibo society, anything strong was related to man, and anything weak was related to woman. As a child, Okonkwo was teased by other kids when they called his father "Agbala". "Agbala" is a Ibo word used in reference to a man who had taken no title or simply "woman". Unoka, Okonkwo’s father, was the exact epitome of failure and weakness to Okonkwo. Because of this "Okonkwo was ruled by one passion- to hate anything his father had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness"(13). Okonkwo’s son, Nwoye, reminded him of his father, and he describes Nwoye as womanly, just as his father had been. Okonkwo showed great dislike for his son by beating him and calling him names. However, he favored his daughter, Ezinma, the most out of all his children. "If Ezinma had been a boy [he] would ...

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