The story shows us the complexity of Nigerian society at the time it was written (1952). One of Achebe's many strengths as a writer was to open Western eyes to the cultural tensions that existed in colonial Africa. Most Westerners tended to see Africa as a culturally homogenous whole. Yet Achebe ably reveals a more nuanced picture, one that is characterized by tensions between town and country, the older generation and the new, tribal customs and the more liberal mores of urban life.
Achebe further confounds the expectations of his Western audience by making a woman the representative of liberal values. For it is Nene who encourages Nnaemeka to defy Ibo tradition and choose his own wife, knowing full well that this is strictly against his father's wishes.
Ancient tribal customs are presented in the story as putting a brake on individual happiness. Perhaps this suggests that Nigerian society cannot...
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begin to emerge from under the shadow of colonialism and take its place in the modern world without adopting a more flexible attitude to some of its more antiquated customs.
Chinua Achebe, himself a Nigerian, chooses to set this story in Nigeria, a land marked by ethnic diversity. Nigeria has more than 250 ethnic groups and these groups are distinct in terms of their culture and language as well as religion, customs and traditions. The two tribes mentioned in this story, the Ibo and the Ibibio, come from southeastern Nigeria, but traditionally did not marry. This story tells the tale of a young Ibo man and a young Ibibio woman who have moved from their native regions to Lagos, a large, modern city in southwestern Nigeria.
Thus when these two individuals fall in love and want to marry it causes great problems with the boy's father, who wishes traditions to be maintained and his son to marry an Ibo woman. The story thus focuses on entrenched cultural traditions about marriage and family, and most importantly, in the figure of the father who relents in order to get to know his grandson, the cost of maintaining those traditions even at the expense of losing your son and never knowing your grandchildren. Consider the final paragraph of the story, told looking at the father:
That night he hardly slept, from remorse - and a vague fear that he might die without making it up to them.