Paper 3 Kaila Cauthorn

Professor Coly May 31, 2012

Masculinity and Authority in Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebes novel Things Fall Apart contains many

examples of people exerting and exhibiting authority over others .

This authority is often demonstrated in manners similar to the

manners in which men are theorized to perform masculinity (Osei-

Nyame 150) . These performances manifest themselves in cases such

as the struggle and ultimate failure of Okonkwo, the main character,

to attain and maintain his position as exemplary leader of the people

of Umuofia . Authority is also observed, by Igbo people and even the

narrator, in women of Umuofia, the Westerners, and the Igbo people

who were converted by the Western missionaries . These

performances and the way that Okonkwo and the other Igbo people

observe, analyze, and relate to them correlate closely to their

demonstrations of authority and personal agency, and thus highlight

these peoples anxieties about what it means to be masculine, and

have agency . They also show that masculinity is very relative

because their perceptions of masculinity are challenged by women,

men of low status, and the Westerners that attempt to colonize them

all .

Okonkwo and many other Igbo men demonstrate their

masculinities in many ways, most particularly through commendable

accomplishments and collections of physical symbols . They have

multiple wives, children, and titles, and successes in growing yams,

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hunting, and wrestling, all to assert their masculinities . These

demonstrations have a greater significance, however; all are tied

directly to actions and operations that uphold the wellbeing and

successful status of Umuofia . As Kwadwo Osei-Nyame writes,

Masculine traditions operate as forms of consciousness that act

foremostly to legitimize specific ideals and values and to distribute

and restrict authority within Umuofia, one of the most powerful of

Igbo communities (150) . All of the masculine traditions in this

community consciously ensure that men exclusively are allowed to

maintain the economy through hunting and farming, to contribute to

maintaining a strong populace by acquiring multiple wives, and to

hone their strength through wrestling so that Umuofia can remain a

community that was feared by all its neighbors (Achebe 9) .

This becomes clear when one notes that although women are

permitted to partake in similar traditions, society intentionally

restricts them from certain aspects of these traditions which, at first

glance, do not even appear to be inherently gendered . The

dichotomization of share-cropping is one such example: And so at a

very early age when he was striving desperately to build a barn

through share-cropping Okonkwo was also fending for his father's

house. It was like pouring grains of corn into a bag full of holes. His

mother and sisters worked hard enough, but they grew women's

crops, like coco-yams, beans and cassava. Yam, the king of crops,

was a man's crop (Achebe 19) . Women are barred from growing the

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most important crop, the one that not only holds the highest value

but which can also sustain the people of that community . It is

specifically the responsibility and the privilege of men to grow the

yams, so that in times of crisis such as the one that Okonkwo faced,

only a man would be able to claim the honor of reviving his family . In

this sense, these women are similar to the female nationalists that

Cynthia Enloe writes about in Nationalism and Masculinity . The

very experiences of a nationalist campaign frequently harden

masculine political privilege . If men are allowed to take most of the

policy-making roles in the movement, they are more likely to be

arrested, gain the status of heroes in jail, learn public skills, all of

which will enable them to claim positions of authority after the

campaign is won . If women are confined to playing the nationalist

wife they are unlikely to have either the skills or the communal

prestige to gain community-wide authority at a later time (Enloe

63) . Because they are denied the responsibility of mens tasks and

labor, women in Umuofia are also denied the opportunities to

cultivate skills and influence their community and economy.

As Osei-Nyame continued, In inventing its traditions and

linking Okonkwos feats with them, Umuofias authoritative discourse

consciously omits other representable values and ideals and

Okonkwos own exclusion from his worldview of, among other things,

gentleness and idleness, is a position that Umuofias fabricated

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traditions sanction (Osei-Nyame 151) . The emphasis on the

accomplishments of men inherently alienates and devalues those

that women, and even men who are not as ostensibly masculine, are

capable of accomplishing . This relegates them to the boundaries of

utility in society, and thus the boundaries of authority and agency .

From there they are appreciated less as individuals and more as

reflections of the men of influence with whom they associate . The

women most frequently become reflections of the men that they

marry . To this effect, the wife of Nwakibie, who is a man of

significant wealth, was described as such : She wore the anklet of

her husbands titles, which the first wife alone could wear (Achebe

16) . The way in which she displays her husbands titles for him is

reminiscent of Kurtzs mistress in Heart of Darkness by Joseph

Conrad, who wore innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her

neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about

her (Conrad 63) . The principle is as clear here as it was in

Conrads novel: women are understood to be of a separate world

than men (Conrad 49) . Their role in the world of men is to act as

reflective possessions.

One concept that complicates the dichotomy of gender is the

word agbala that people of Umuofia use . Early in the story, the

narrator explains that agbala is a word used as an insult to a man

who has taken no title, and, most importantly, serves also as a term

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to refer to a woman (Achebe, 11) . This is one of many points that

clarify the hierarchy of gender early in the book; it illustrates that

the furthest level a man can descend to is that of a woman, thus

marking the woman as the most base and undesirable entity . This

hierarchy is consistent throughout most of the remainder of the

narrative; another notable example is when Okonkwo is banished

from his community after committing a crime that was considered

womanly and thus more shameful than a mans crime (Achebe,

111) . However, the word agbala complicates this hierarchy when it

reappears as the name of a god, the Oracle of the Hills and Caves

(Achebe, 13). Therefore, the term for woman stands between two

extremes: the lowest form of man, one with no title, and the highest

form of being, a god . This is additionally emphasized by the role of

the priestess, who serves as a woman that relays prophesies

between the god and human beings .

The priestess is an uncommon example of a woman who

exhibits authority and agency over men in some cases, even though

women are more often portrayed in this society as the subservient

gender . For instance, when Okonkwos father journeys to the Oracle

Agbala for advice on farming, the Priestess Chika reprimands him for

expecting to be successful despite eschewing hard work, and orders

him to Go home and work like a man (Achebe 14) . Through this

example, a woman, who by definition is not allowed to partake in

masculine performances such as growing yams or achieving titles

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(Achebe 19), is able to assert authority over a man in a sense and

enforce the boundaries of his gender by telling him to work like a

man . Later, another priestess name Chielo is able to thwart another

social expectation when she seizes Ezinma, Okonkwos daughter, to

take her to the Oracle (Achebe 90) . It is unlikely that any other

average woman would have been able to seize a mans daughter

the idea that an average woman would have a right to her own

children is unlikely and is considered ludicrous (Achebe 65) . This

prompts the question of whether women are truly seen to be as

wholly inferior as they are normally treated in Umuofia, or if they are

recognized to have latent authority in degrees similar or even equal

to those of men, as the priestesses suggest .

Closer inspection reveals that the people of Umuofia most likely

do not attribute the power and agency that the priestesses embody

to the women themselves, or to any women, but instead rationalize

that her authority is justified by the womens association with the

god Agbala . The metaphor of the woman as a medium is perhaps

most effective because it portrays her as a device that the Oracle

uses to reach human beings . Indeed, when the priestess Chielo

interacts with people outside of the context of her profession, she is

perceived as a normal woman . As Achebe writes, In ordinary life

Chielo was a widow with two children . She was very friendly with

Ekwefi and they shared a common shed in the market . Anyone

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seeing Chielo in ordinary life would hardly believe she was the same

person who prophesied when the spirit of Agbala was upon her

(Achebe 42) . Her averageness is quickly and effectively conveyed:

despite her role as a priestess, she is subject like any other woman

to the paradigm of conventional family life, which among the Igbo

allows no room for a woman to hold much authority . At the wrestling

match she stands with the masses of women and insignificant men,

and is tangibly separated from men of importance who are allowed

to sit at the forefront of the crowd . Through this perspective, the

authority that the priestesses are granted is invalid for use toward

their own personal benefits and they therefore might not accurately

represent the concept of a woman with authority and agency of her

own . However, the duplicity of authority present still complicates the

definition of masculinity in Umuofia.

The masculinity in Things Fall Apart is challenged also by the

arrival of the Westerners . They overcame the masculinities of the

Igbo not by conventional force, but even more confounding by

using unknown methods and methods that were decidedly not

masculine . For example, the missionaries were initially dismissed as

harmless and not worth concern particularly because they did not

heed the sacrosanct restrictions of the Igbo, such as the danger of

living in the Evil Forest . The leaders of Mbanta reasoned that the

missionaries could not warrant much authority if they were foolish

enough to challenge the established authority of evil in the forest . As

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one of them said, Let us give them a portion of the Evil Forest .

They boast about victory over death . Let us give them a real

battlefield in which to show their victory (Achebe 134) . Reading

and writing also characterized their lifestyle, and the value of these

activities could not be understood in a community in which oral

tradition reigned and reading and writing were unnecessary .

The harmlessness of the missionaries was also attributed to the

group of followers that they attracted . Just as women are intended to

be viewed as reflections of the men with whom they associate, so

too are the weaker men and outcasts who were attracted by

Christianity seen as reflections of the missionaries. The narrator

writes of the people that were taken from the clan by the

missionaries, That was a source of great sorrow to the leaders of

the clan; but many of them believed that the strange faith and the

white man's god would not last . None of his converts was a man

whose word was heeded in the assembly of the people . None of them

was a man of title . They were mostly the kind of people that were

called efulefu, worthless, empty men . Chielo, the priestess of

Agbala, called the converts the excrement of the clan, and the new

faith was a mad dog that had come to eat it up (Achebe 128) . In

other words, the people who had resisted conversion considered the

converts to be reflections of the missionaries authority in a similar

way that the masculinities of men like Okonkwo were judged based

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on their possessions, like their yams, titles, and wives . Because the

converts themselves were of little value in the Igbo culture, this

translated to the missionaries, who were then understood to be men

who would be of little value in the present culture . Implicit in this

reasoning is the idea that the missionaries had a separate kind of

masculinity that might have translated to value and authority in a

separate environment, but because the Igbo had only had

experienced their own strict definitions of masculinity and authority ,

they could not fully entertain this possibility .

The Westerners were ultimately able to overcome Okonkwo and

thus herald the beginning of the end of the Igbo people because

many of them had failed to comprehend the nature and degree of

the foreigners power . The same Westerners who were dismissed as

only being able to recruit outcasts and mothers of twins later

recruited court messengers from the distant community of Umuru

who , despite also being the subject of the Umuofian peoples

ridicule , incarcerated Umuofian men of high titles under order of the

District Commissioner (Achebe 157) . Such a reversal of power defied

the Igbo peoples very understanding of masculinity and power,

similarly to the manner in which the Westerners defied the gods, the

highest manifestations of authority, multiple times without receiving

the appropriate consequences (Achebe 143) .

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The continuing perversion of status and tradition also

represents the fault with the Umuofian peoples definition of

masculinity, particularly that it is ambiguous and incomplete. Many

of the firmest pillars of masculinity were overturned, not in order to

demonstrate that one was superior to another, but rather to

illustrate the arbitrary nature of masculinity in general . Multiple

representations are possible, and all of them are only subjectively

true . As Michael Kimmel writes, Globalization disrupts and

reconfigures traditional, neocolonial, or other national, regional, or local

economic, political, and cultural arrangements. In so doing, globalization

transforms local articulations of both domestic and public patriarchy

(Kimmel, 414). The Westerners articulation of masculinity in the Lower

Niger became the most relevant masculinity to the newly created context

of arrangements. For example, Umuofian people initially doubted the

utility of learning to read and write, but literacy soon became

currency in the newly developing community . [Mr. Brown] went from

family to family begging people to send their children to his school. But

at first they only sent their slaves or sometimes their lazy children. Mr.

Brown begged and argued and prophesied. He said that the leaders of

the land in the future would be men and women who had learnt to read

and write. And it was not long before the people began to say that the

white man's medicine was quick in working. Mr. Brown's school produced

quick results. A few months in it were enough to make one a court

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messenger or even a court clerk. Mr. Brown's mission grew from

strength to strength, and because of its link with the new administration

it earned a new social prestige (Achebe 162) . Eventually, the District

Commissioner would topple the reigning oral tradition by seizing,

through literature, the Igbo peoples right to their own self-

determination (Achebe 185). By condensing their stories into

disjointed passages in a book about the Pacification of the Primitive

Tribes of the Lower Niger, the District Commissioner negated

generations of their oral tradition as well as taking away their power

to define their lives and culture for themselves.

Okonkwo can serve as Umuofia s metonym for many parts of

this phenomenon; even among his own people, his masculinity was

incomplete . Early in the narrative he is described as having a slight

stammer and whenever he was angry and could not get his words

out quickly enough, he would use his fists (Achebe 2). This directly

contradicts the ideal patriarch of Umuofia, as the reader later comes

to understand; speaking articulately and in meaningful proverbs was

critical to commanding authority among the Igbo people. Okonkwo

could not escape without this fault becoming his poetic undoing.

Okonkwo invested faith in aggression and edginess in lieu of oratory

prowess, but violence, an imperfect science, betrayed him and led to

his inadvertent slaughter of a clansman and to his descent from the

apex of patriarchy (Achebe 110-111). Additionally, the wealth of

physical symbols that Okonkwo used to express his masculinity were

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promptly and easily removed from his possession by his clansmen,

thus emphasizing the weakness of the foundation on which his power

rested (Achebe 111).

Ironically, Unoka was more successful than his son , at least in

terms of survival, because he enjoyed the mastery of words that

Okonkwo lacked . Early in the story , Unoka strategically employs the

logic of a traditional proverb in order to avoid repaying a debt to

Okoye, a more conventionally successful man (Achebe 5) . [Unoka]

questions the hierarchy of eminence and authority that titled men

like Okoye and Okonkwo represent within Umuofia . Unokas

reinterpretation and reconstruction of the real and the important

circumvents the signifying economy or realism of his culture and he

finds a way to invent a conceptual universe where the redefinition

and reinterpretation of reality enable him to emerge momentarily

within its traditions as a figure of authority (Osei-Nyame 154) .

Although Unoka died without achieving greatness by the

conventional standards of his community , he was able to manipulate

the flexible definitions of his community s masculinities and

authority in order to keep himself alive .

Things Fall Apart proves that masculinity is always relative and

subject to manipulation. Men of Umuofia collected yams and titles as

possessions , in spite of the unrelenting possibility that the crops

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could all be taken from them at a moment s notice, leaving their

masculinities and authority without substance . Enough space is left

between the strictures of the gender dichotomy for women to attain

authority and enforce it over men , and for men without titles or

conventional success to survive . The societies of Igbo people began

to succumb to the Western foreigners not necessarily because the

latter had a superior system of authority , but because they failed to

comprehend each others system , rendering themselves

incompatible with one another .

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Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Cambridge: Literature Online, 2006.

Electronic.
Bamiro, Edmund. "Nativization Strategies: Nigerianisms at the
Intersection of Deology and Gender in Achebe's Fiction." World
Englishes 25.3/4 (2006): 315-28. Wiley Online Library. Blackwell
Publishing Ltd., 12 Oct. 2006. Web. 31 May 2012.
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-
971X.2006.00473.x/abstract>.
Conrad, Joseph (2006-01-09). Heart of Darkness (Kindle Location 1410).
Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.
Enloe, Cynthia. Nationalism and Masculinity. Bananas, Beaches and
Bases. Berkeley: University of California Press 42-64. [electronic
reserve]
Kimmel, Michael. Globalization and its (Male)contents. Handbook of
Studies on Men and Masculinities. 414-431. (electronic reserve)
Osei-Nyame, Kwadwo. "Chinua Achebe Writing Culture: Representations
of Gender and Tradition in Things Fall Apart." Research in African
Literatures 30.2 (1999): 148-61. Chinua Achebe Writing Culture:
Representations Of Gender And Tradition In Things Fall Apart.
Indiana University Press. Web. 31 May 2012.
<http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=98936573>.

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