What is the role of oral tradition/literature in Things Fall Apart? Use some examples and explain how they help the story-telling.

Chinua Achebe makes on Things Fall Apart a curious and special way to tell the story of Okonkwo. The role of oral tradition and the literature era are very important to Achebe for his peculiar way of writing. Achebe wants to transmit how Africans pass their oral tradition in his novel. This, by making the story be told by a third person but with a omniscient point of view,like if there where elders of a tribe.

One of the aspects that makes Achebe's novel unique  in his way of writing is the use of African words. By using this, the reader can feel and relate to the oral traditions of Africa. One example is in chapter nine, where Ezinma has fever or iba, and Okonkwo "took his machete and went into the bush to collect the leaves and grasses and barks of trees that went into making the medicine for iba". This kind of parts are the ones that makes the reader go inside the story, because of the context that the novel gives. Another example where it demonstrates the use of African words: " Outside the obi Okagbue and Okonkwo where digging the pitto find where Enzinma has buried ver iyi-uwa". Achebe wants to transmit to his readers the sensation of being part of the tribe, to feel what they think and feel.

Another important aspect about Things Fall Apart is that it gives the context of the 19th Century, of the colonization of Africa. Achebe wants to transmit the African point of view through the storytelling. For example, since the start of the novel, the narrator is  telling how Okonkwo became important on the  village. It is an omniscient narrator and I think it relates to what oral tradition is about, because he is not objective in some parts of the novel but he knows what he wants to transmit to the reader, like an elder that wants their villagers to feel their stories. It is clear that the post-colonialism literature is present on this book, even that he wrote it on 1958.

Things Fall Apart is a novel that, in my opinion, is the antithesis of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness for many reasons, and one of them is the African oral tradition that is present through all the novel. His way of writing, even that is in English, transmits his African way of telling stories and, it is clear that he wants to proof that Africans tell stories way different than Europeans or Americans.