The Text, History and the Igbo World

Abstract

Through the text, we are able to understand our world. Many literary texts such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, No Longer at Ease and even Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Miniorities, are like windows into the Igbo World. Most cultures have tried to make sense of their world through mythology. This is same for the Igbo. When it is said that the Igbo are republican and democratic in nature, how can we know that? When it is said that the Igbo have no kings, what does that mean? Are we able to understand the Igbo world through their texts? This is not to play down on the so-called scientific researches about the Igbo: it was proven that the selected texts helped us to fully gain insight into the Igbo world. This was the objective of this paper. It was purely a qualitative research; however, there were objective deductions and inductions in order to establish any concepts as they genuinely are. The theoretical frameworks that aided the critical analysis of the works were New Historicism, Structuralism and Formalism. New Historicism was used in analysing the bulk of the data, and in some cases the structuralist or formalist method was used to isolate units of knowledge, which were furthermore historicized in order to enable proper understanding of the Igbo world. The methodologies used were qualitative data analysis, collection of information from local informants and analysing the pieces of information against available data in texts. There were three hypotheses and finally a conclusion