The Importance Of Power In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

In the book Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo is a successful farmer in his village that looks, and wants, to gain more power throughout the book, but it creates deep consequences for him. Throughout the book Heart of Darkness, Mr. Kurtz is a successful man whose life is consumed by the need to find ivory and the need to become successful. Society leads people to believe that in order to be happy, people need to be successful and powerful. Although the need for power captures people and make them do irrational actions. It leads people to want more power after they’ve gotten powerful. No one is to believe that they can gain too much power because society makes one believe that with power, life is better, so people seek to retrieve as much power as possible. In Things Fall Apart,
They told the people how their religion was wrong and that the only right religion was Christianity (Achebe 144-145). They didn’t bother caring what the Ibo people believed they just wanted to have more converts in their religion to make it more powerful. They had their minds set that the Ibo people’s gods could not be real since they were the more civilized, many even more powerful, people. Some Ibo people did not like the fact that these missionaries were trying to push their religion on them. To show that they still had power, some of the Ibo tribe members decided to burn down many of the Christian’s buildings, due to one of their own who transferred to Christianity committing a serious crime to the natives (Achebe 190-191). They looked to show that they still had power, even these missionaries had come in and preached their beliefs and influenced many Ibo people to switch to Christianity. The people used their power to do wrong against the men by burning down their buildings. Their need to show that they are still powerful possessed them, in a way, to do damage to others’