His customs had diminished as much as his old personality. "Okonkwo and his family worked very hard to plant new farm. But it was like learning to become left handed in old age. Work no longer had for him the pleasure it used to have, and when there was no work to do he sat in a silent half-sleep." (131) Since he got his first seed yams from Nwakibie and made his family prosper, Okonkwo had felt such an intense love for farming, and keeping down his compound. He had to be the man of his house because his father wasn't a very strong man, and he also he had a lot of debt with his other clansmen. Okonkwo made a comfortable life possible for his family because of farming. But when the things around him start the transcend, he loses all passion for the things he used to love which drives him to the level of depression. A level at which the only thing he can be passionate about is the riddance of the Christian people. This leads to pure anarchy just in the poem.
"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best of which lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.," (Lines 7-8 W. B. Yeats) describes just how sudden the change was in Umuofia. The white man came in like a strong wave, and killed the customs of the Ibo, leaving those who did not convert practically alone. The Europeans that were at the head of the Commissioner's Office partook in the in the torture of Okonkwo and five other men of honour when they stood up for a fellow egwugwu when he was unmasked and stripped of his spiritual power. Such a crime in Umuofia makes you look like the lowest of scum, but Enoch the Christian man really was the lowest from those six men's points of view. He had killed the sacred snake in the name of Christ, to show them that he was just a snake, and had no spiritual power like they believed. Of course they were infuriated.
