The main theme and purpose of this book is disintegration; it illustrates the disintegration of a whole culture of rare richness that is taken over by Christian missionaries and conquerors.
A few years before the land was taken from the clans’ grasp, Okonkwo was paid a visit from an old friend from Umuofia who told him about this strange white man with an iron horse – which we suppose is a bicycle – who was riding past Abame who got killed by the people of the village. Some days later in the midst of the marketplace the people saw there were a whole crowd of these white people. Out of the blue, the white men started shooting and it turned into a massacre in which there was no one but the white men standing.
Later, around three to four years later, the narrator describes a scene in which we could the land of Umuofia and Okonkwo’s land full of Christian churches with missionaries and white men speaking their foreign language all around.
The conquest of the white man was so thorough that Nwoye, Okonkwo’s oldest son was converted to the Christian faith. Apparently, “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 Ikefuna who was killed He felt relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul.” (pg. 147) Nwoye was a Christian and denied his father.
Things were definitely falling apart.
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