Evil in Things That Fall Apart Throughout the novel Things That Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, the reader feels evil. Evil is a difficult concept to define. The dictionary calls it “morally bad; evil” (Funk & Wagnalls 220). But is the definition of evil really that simple? Many would say that there is more to defining evil than a few words. Evil can also be defined by a culture. If one were to study the various cultures of the world, they would discover that each culture has a different way of defining evil. World politics also sometimes plays a role in defining evil. But personal definition seems to have the greatest impact on what one believes is evil. Theology has played an important role in defining evil for thousands of years. The Bible teaches Christians that Satan is evil and they should not follow his teachings. Evil as a concept in Christianity developed in the third and fourth centuries. In that period Saint Augustine established that "evil is the privation, or absence, of good, just as darkness is the absence of light". (Funk&Wagnalls19) In modern times, theology has had difficulty defending the existence of God in light of the numerous atrocities that have occurred over the past 100 years, such as the Holocaust, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the cleansing ethnic. of Kosovo. As a result, theology must now redefine what evil is. Cultures and politics between cultures have a way of defining evil for their inhabitants. Europeans who visited the Ibo culture in Things Fall Apart saw many of the customs practiced by the natives as evil, barbaric, or primitive. The Ibo concept of the "Evil Forest" was one of these. It was something that every village had and "In it were buried all those who died of truly terrible diseases, such as leprosy and smallpox." (Achebe 148) Another belief held by the tribe in the novel is that if a woman has children, and each of them dies under “evil” circumstances, then she is being attacked by an evil tormentor. The remedy to this problem is "Do not let her sleep in her hut. Let her go and be with her people. Thus she will escape her evil tormentor and break her evil cycle of birth and death" (Achebe 77).