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In this last passage of the novel Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe declares that stories told from an outside perspective that neglects to delve into the culture are often incorrect. The actions and events within a culture can be easily misunderstood without full understanding.
It is important to note how the last paragraph is written from the District Commissioners’ point of view. Achebe does this to show how the white men have taken over, and the story he is telling will be vastly different than Achebe’s story. The commissioner’s story will exclude all the corrupt things his people have done, this destruction can be seen in the quote “A District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point.” His story will also lose the culture and traditions of the Ibo people because the Europeans have failed to recognize them, as seen in the quote “There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details.” Achebe is trying to tell the reader about how in past books written by Europeans about African culture, the most important and defining details and events have been removed or oversimplified. The commissioner is highly insensitive and knows little regarding the culture he is writing about. It’s ironic that Achebe wrote an entire book on the character of Okonkwo because the Commissioner is planning on cutting out the majority of important details of Okwanko's story, as seen in the quote “one could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate.” The word pacification (meaning an attempt to create or maintain peace) used in the title of the story the European is writing is ironic because the white men have actually been invasive and truly the main cause for most of the tribes’ recent problems. The word primitive also used in the title shows how this commissioner neglected to delve into the complexity of the Igbo culture. This all shows the extreme extent of the commissioners’ misunderstanding of the culture of Okonkwo’s people. Overall, this final paragraph is written to show how the same event can be perceived extremely differently by two different cultures, and the importance of diving in, acknowledging details and other perspectives. The title of the commissioner’s work displays that he does not understand the people he is studying. Achebe makes it clear that the Commissioner has a like of sensitivity for Okonkwo’s life and death, and how many stories like Okonkwo’s have been tragically lost in history.
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