SOURCE: “Principle and Practice: The Logic of Cultural Violence in Achebe's Things Fall Apart,” in College Literature, Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter, 1999, pp. 69–79.

In the following essay, Hoegberg considers the disparity between principle and practice among the characters in Things Fall Apart and how this disparity eventually leads to alienation and violence.

The phrase “cultural violence” need not refer only to violence between people of different cultures. It can also refer to violence that is encouraged by the beliefs and traditions of a given culture and practiced upon its own members. “Cultural violence” used in this sense would include ritual sacrifices, punishments for crimes, and other kinds of communally sanctioned violence. Often, the communal sanction given to acts of violence springs from unexamined assumptions and contradictions within the culture and shared by a majority of its members. This insight, I will argue, is a major theme of Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel...