Quote 19
“Let us not reason like cowards,” said Okonkwo. “If a man comes into my hut and defecates on the floor, what do I do? Do I shut my eyes? No! I take a stick and break his head. That is what a man does. These people are daily pouring filth over us, and Okeke says we should pretend not to see.” Okonkwo made a sound full of disgust. This was a womanly clan, he thought. Such a thing could never happen in his fatherland, Umuofia. (18.22)
Okonkwo associates cowardice with femininity and thus calls the Mbanta tribe womanly for their refusal to violently resist the Christians. He equates action and violence with masculinity and his warlike Umuofia clan.
Quote 20
“It was only this morning,” said Obierika “that Okonkwo and I were talking about Abame and Aninta, where titled men climb trees and pound foo-foo for their wives.”
“All their customs are upside-down. They do not decide bride-price as we do, with sticks. They haggle and bargain as if they were buying a goat or a cow in the market.”
“That is very bad,” said Obierika’s eldest brother. “But what is good in one place is bad in another place. In Umunso they do not bargain at all, not even with broomsticks. The suitor just goes on bringing bags of cowries until his in-laws tell him to stop. It is a bad custom because it always leads to a quarrel.”
“The world is large,” said Okonkwo. “I have even heard that in some tribes a man’s children belong to his wife and her family.”
“That cannot be,” said Machi. “You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the children.” (8.84-88)
The Umuofia are dead set in their definitions of what is masculine and what is feminine. Machi can’t even abide by the idea that in some cultures, women own their children. He compares that aberration of appropriate social structure to the impossibility of women being on top during sex – which you only have to check out Cosmopolitan once to know that isn’t really an impossibility. Anyway, the men seem to feel that their own masculinity is threatened by other tribes flouting different customs. Okonkwo and many of the other Umuofia men, then seem to derive their feelings of masculine self-worth from outside sources – like cultural practices – rather than from an internal feeling of positive self-image.
Whenever the thought of his father’s weakness and failure troubled him he expelled it by thinking about his own strength and success. And so he did now. His mind went to his latest show of manliness.
“I cannot understand why you refused to come with us to kill that boy,” he asked Obierika. (8.20-21)
When fearful of being like his father, Okonkwo has to reassure himself strongly of his own masculinity. Strangely, Okonkwo considers joining in the murder of Ikemefuna as being a “show of masculinity.” Considering that one traditional aspect of masculinity is being the protector of one’s family, killing Ikemefuna might just be cruel and gruesome, rather than masculine.