Chapters 12 - 18

"A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors" (122). In Chapters 12 and 13 Achebe presents some of the chief of these, the rites for betrothal and of death. Achebe is showing the basic dignity and humanity of his people. Such rituals make for the general well-being and health of a community, lend social organization, order, and harmony to relationships, invest life with seriousness, and are occasions for joy and celebration.

At Exudu's funeral, Okonkwo in an excess of masculine energy inadvertently kills a young fellow celebrant. In accord with tribal justice, he must flee from the village with his family, and all his possessions must be destroyed. It may be helpful to compare this procedure to that of the cities of refuge as outlined in Mosaic law. He flees with his family to Mbanta, the village of his mother's ancestors. The event breaks Okonkwo's spirit. "His life had been ruled by a great passion--to become one of the lords of the clan. That had been his life-spring. And he had all but achieved it. Then everything had been broken" (131). Given his excessive material interests and social ambitions, together with his past attitudes and actions, the reader has a limited sympathy for him at this point; one may feel his being broken is in order. His extreme reactions to the coming of the white men tend further to alienate him from the readers' sympathies.

The text gives us three male characters whom we admire more than Okonkwo: Obierika, Uchendu, and Nwoye. Obierika is a friend of the truest kind: he has given sound and thoughtful advice, shown his sympathy and understanding, and in Okonkwo's absence from Umuofia tends his fields, harvests and sells his yams, and brings great sacks full of the money to Okonkwo in Mbanta. Uchendu attracts us by his kindly reception of Okonkwo and his family and his imparting of wise advice. But the reader's sympathies are especially with Nwoye. We have sympathized with his dismay at the tribal practice of abandoning new-born twins to die in the wilderness; we have deeply empathized with him in his sense of utter loss in the killing of Ikemefuna; and we agree with his early preference for his mother's folk-tales over his father's stories of war.

Therefore, when the missionaries come to Umuofia and Nwoye is one of their earliest converts, desiring to take advantage of their newly instituted school to learn to read and write, the reader is inclined to think favorably towards the introduction of Christianity, in spite of some of the missionaries' methods, some of which are misinformed and awkward. The initial advent of the colonialists, with their massacring an entire village, is deplorable.

The text shows the steady growth of the mission effort in spite of the clash between the white man's ways and the tribes' general reaction to them, offering a thoughtful critique which implies mistakes and misunderstandings on both sides. Nwoye is shown attracted and won first not by the doctrines of Christianity as such, but by something which appeals to the depths of his being. Achebe writes: "It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul---the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth. Nwoye's callow mind was great puzzled" (147). The appeal is first to his heart, not his head.