In Things Fall Apart, were the Igbo people civilized?

This
depends on your point of view. The British colonial administrators in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries tended to use the word "civilized" to reflect their own
value system. They tended to think that "civilized" meant white Christians dressing in
European style and having a highly literate European style of bureaucracy. Of course, the Igbo
were not British and did not fit that model. The Igbo recognized cultural differences and the
diversity of different peoples, as seen when when Achebe states:

The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with
others.

Even though the Igbo were not
"civilized" from the narrow viewpoint of the British in the novel, the Igbo had their
own civilization, with their own religion, oral traditions, modes of governance, and customs.
The Igbo thus were what an objective reader would call civilized. Much of theof the book deals
with the breakdown of Igbo civilization as a result of colonialism and how Igbo...