Things Fall Apart, Chapters Twenty, Twenty-One, and Twenty-Two

You have learned that the Ibo tribe is a tight knit community that thrives on rituals and traditions shared throughout the tribe. When Okonkwo shows up in his motherland Mbanta, another village within the Ibo tribe, his uncle knows what it means without Okonkwo having to tell the story of his exile. This cultural fabric is stretched and altered by the arrival of the British missionaries and, in these next few chapters, by the institution of British government in these tribal communities. Like a piece of rope being frayed and torn apart, what happens when the cultural fabric of the Ibo is stretched and altered? Can a community continue to be a community?

Essential Question

• Can a community be a unified group of people without shared rituals and traditions?