British and Ibo

At first the Ibo town was destroyed by the white people so there was a sense of danger and mystery surrounding them, so when they arrived in Okonkwo’s motherland everybody wanted to see them. The villagers were amused by the Christian religion so they let them stay. Soon people became attracted to the new religion because of the songs and ideas. The tribal people soon began to understand how the Christians could not accept their ideas and culture. When Okonkwo returned to his fatherland he saw how different it was. Although not everyone was converted, quite a few were. They leader of this church however was very kind. He actually tried to understand the different traditions and the religion of the Ibo. This improved the relations between the two different groups. Everything fell apart when Mr. Brown, the nice person, got sick and they replaced him with Mr. Smith. This man is not very nice and only saw the villagers as things to make profit off of. The judicial system got worse too. They gave people that were low in the social class the job of a court messenger. These people became corrupt and were mean to the Ibo. In the end the British viewed the Africans way of life as savage and wrong. They were like Mr. Smith and saw everything in black and white, black being evil, and in their minds black being the African culture.

Okonkwo's ignorance

Okonkwo is physically strong, but nowhere near being mentally strong. He cannot see and accept the fact that other people can be caring and show emotion. He does have admiration for his wives, especially his second wife Ekwefi, but he thinks it is weak to show that so he still beats her. This instability of his emotion causes a lot of anger that he takes out again on his wives, like in the incident where one of his wives takes off some leaves from a banana tree and he beats her for it. Most of his mishaps with this stuff appear in his son Nwoye. He tries to harden this kid to be manly and strong even though he is not, but will work hard. He wants him to be a person with no weaknesses such as admiration and caring for other people, which he is full of. Also when Okonkwo is trying to show strength by not having a “women virtue” he ends up killing an adopted son, Ikemefuma. This also effects Nwoye, and he becomes very tired of Okonkwo’s ability to understand him, so he goes Christian to leave his dad.

Okonkwo

I think that Okonkwo is bad person. He is very mentally weak with a giant ego, which always leads him to beating his family even though he likes them. He is also so unstable and mean that when his wife pulled a few leaves off of a banana tree he beat her then tried to shoot her, but missed because he’s a crappy shot. Furthermore, when he is “taking Ikemefuma back to his village” he kills him. Ikemefuma tries to escape and runs to Okonkwo calling for him to help him, he just kills him like its nothing just to prove to his fellow villagers that he is not weak. He is also very strict with his son. If his son cries or shows any sign of weakness he beats him. He cannot realize that his son is different than him and is not obsessed with violence and drinking palm wine out of human heads.