Achebe represents Africa with a genuine desire to represent the continent without a filter or distorted lens. He shows the horror and trauma of colonialization and the psychological toll that takes on a culture as its members watch their history and heritage being decimated and trampled over without a flicker of scruples from missionaries with a raging white saviour complex. Enoch eats the sacred snake in blatant rejection of his own culture - a physical representation of a community being ripped apart from the inside at the arrival of a tyrannical, brainwashing, and indoctrinating force who already decided it owned black people before they even stepped off their boats. I believe Achebe wants the reader to see the beauty of a continent so vibrant, so unthinkably immense but so often discounted. He wants us to recognize the life and culture that thrived and buzzed before, during, and after the violent and violating attacks and infringements it suffered at the hands of greed, xenophobia, and unrestrained eurocentrism. There is a sense of contemptuous self-entitlement and malevolence that is prevalent throughout the second part of the novel once the colonizers arrive and begin something of a crusade within the African villages under the flimsy guise of “saving” the African tribes that they so carelessly destroy. However, Achebe does not allow any bias - no matter how justified it may be in the face of the meddling and often malicious colonizer - to pervade his novel when representing Africa and its culture. Achebe does not hide the flaws or questionable practices of the Igbo tribe. The protagonist Okonkwo is arguably one of the most unlikeable characters in the whole story, and yet he is a man most respected among his village. He beats his wives - and even tries to kill one of them when she makes an offhand remark about his poor shooting skills; he kills the boy, Ikemefuna, whom he raised as a son for the sole reason to save face and keep up the facade of a strong, unflinching and emotionless male. Toxic masculinity and lack of equality for women is a clear and prevalent issue Achebe makes an active effort to point out. Moreover, Achebe does not feign the Igbo society as perfectly fully functioning, effective and smooth running before the missionaries arrive. He does not pretend it was their arrival and their arrival only that brought negative energy, tension and division to the tribe. The Igbo tribe severely punishes people for things that are out of their control, for example when Okonkwo accidentally killed Ezeudu’s son and then he was exiled for mutiple years and his entire family has to start a whole new life somewhere else despite being entirely innocent. Another example of this is when ikemefuna was sent to be killed because it was the “word of god”. It seems here a fear of the wrath of god is greater than the compassion for the real life human that lives among them - not to mention the immorality of Ikemefuna even living in their village to begin with, since he had been previously ripped away from his own family as a young boy as a sacrifice and payment from another village, as if this young boy is merely a commodity or bargaining tool rather than a human being. It can thus be argued that Achebe wants the reader to see Africa in a genuine light, for he is not afraid to show the reader some of the uglier truths and the internal strife and turmoil the continent and its plethora of tribes went through - developing centuries worth of cultural practices, norms, heritage, wars, celebrations, art and dispositions - before the European colonizers even arrived and stopped Africa in its tracks from a free and independent development of its own heritage and mindset .
