Sunday, 2 July 2017

What justice system does the Ibo culture have before the white men arrive in Things Fall Apart?

The Ibo
justice system before the white man's arrival was very traditional and intertwined with their
religion. For example, the many taboos and forbidden actions could be counted among laws. The
novel points this out several times that there were some aspects of the lives of Ibo people that
didn't need to be enforced at all because breaking those rules was unthinkable. This includes
one of the crimes committed by a Christian convert, who kills the sacred python, the emanation
of the god of water. The novel has this to say on the matter:


If a clansman killed a royal python accidentally, he made sacrifices of atonement and
performed an expensive burial ceremony such as was done for a great man. No punishment was
prescribed for a man who killed the python knowingly. Nobody thought that such a thing could
ever happen.

As another answers to this question have
pointed out, the Ibo justice system revolved largely around balancing. If the natural order of
things was pushed out of balance, it...

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