Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart (1958)

Chinua Achebe's game-changing first book has almost a separate existence from the rest of his books. It is immensely famous and widely-read.

Things Fall Apart was the first African novel to directly portray the arrival of colonization. A book for Africans, written in a lingua franca: English, a language that becomes reconstructed in the process. Things Fall Apart conducts a conversation with the European literary tradition whose importance continues to resonate. The effect of reading it is transformative. The long, wonderfully realized, unromantic, credible picture of Igbo life in the 1870s that occupies the first two thirds of the book is crucial. By then we're prepared to see how the incomers, well-meaning or not, wreck a culture they don't understand.



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And so the neighbouring clans who naturally knew of these things feared Umuofia, and would not go to war against it without first trying a peaceful settlement. And in fairness to Umuofia it should be recorded that it never went to war unless its case was clear and just and was accepted as such by its Oracle - the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves. And there were indeed occasions when the Oracle had forbidden Umuofia to wage a war. If the clan had disobeyed the Oracle they would surely have been beaten, because their dreaded agadi-nwayi would never fight what the Ibo call a fight of blame.

But the war that now threatened was a just war. Even the enemy clan knew that. And so when Okonkwo of Umuofia arrived at Mbaino as the proud and imperious emissary of war, he was treated with great honour and respect, and two days later he returned home with a lad of fifteen and a young virgin. The lad's name was Ikemefuna, whose sad story is still told in Umuofia unto this day.

The elders, or ndichie, met to hear a report of Okonkwo's mission. At the end they decided, as everybody knew they would, that the girl should go to Ogbuefi Udo to replace his murdered wife. As for the boy, he belonged to the clan as a whole, and there was no hurry to decide his fate. Okonkwo was, therefore, asked on behalf of the clan to look after him in the interim. And so for three years Ikemefuna lived in Okonkwo's household.

Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children. Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo's fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father. Even as a little boy he had resented his father's failure and weakness, and even now he still remembered how he had suffered when a playmate had told him that his father was agbala. That was how Okonkwo first came to know that agbala was not only another name for a woman, it could also mean a man who had taken no title. And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion - to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.

During the planting season Okonkwo worked daily on his farms from cock-crow until the chickens went to roost. He was a very strong man and rarely felt fatigue. But his wives and young children were not as strong, and so they suffered. But they dared not complain openly. Okonkwo's first son, Nwoye, was then twelve years old but was already causing his father great anxiety for his incipient laziness. At any rate, that was how it looked to his father, and he sought to correct him by constant nagging and beating. And so Nwoye was developing into a sad-faced youth.

Okonkwo's prosperity was visible in his household. He had a large compound enclosed by a thick wall of red earth. His own hut, or obi, stood immediately behind the only gate in the red walls. Each of his three wives had her own hut, which together formed a half moon behind the obi. The barn was built against one end of the red walls, and long stacks of yam stood out prosperously in it. At the opposite end of the compound was a shed for the goats, and each wife built a small attachment to her hut for the hens. Near the barn was a small house, the "medicine house" or shrine where Okonkwo kept the wooden symbols of his personal god and of his ancestral spirits. He worshipped them with sacrifices of kola nut, food and palm-wine, and offered prayers to them on behalf of himself, his three wives and eight children.

So when the daughter of Umuofia was killed in Mbaino, Ikemefuna came into Okonkwo's household. When Okonkwo brought him home that day he called his most senior wife and handed him over to her.

"He belongs to the clan," he told her. "So look after him."

"Is he staying long with us?" she asked.

"Do what you are told, woman," Okonkwo thundered, and stammered. "When did you become one of the ndichie of Umuofia?"


(from Things Fall Apart, Chapter II)


Online text of the whole novel:
http://l-adam-mekler.com/things-fall-apart.pdf




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Achebe's 1975 lecture "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'":

http://kirbyk.net/hod/image.of.africa.html


A brilliant article by Kittitian-British author Caryl Phillips, recounting his conversation with Achebe about Conrad:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/22/classics.chinuaachebe


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Kwame Anthony Appiah's discussion of Achebe's use of proverbial wisdom:


http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/05/22/the-achievement-of-chinua-achebe/







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Achebe's death in 2013 triggered some powerful testimony to what a novelist can still mean in our own time.

Chinelo Okparanta (AGNI online):
https://www.bu.edu/agni/essays/online/2013/okparanta.html

Wole Soyinka and JP Clark:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/22/chinua-achebe-wole-soyinka-jp-clark?

Wole Soyinka's earlier poem, "Elegy for the Nation: for Chinua Achebe at 70":
http://brittlepaper.com/2013/05/elegy-nation-soyinka-poem/

Pusch Commey (New African Magazine):
http://newafricanmagazine.com/salutations-tributes/

Genie Gratto:
http://www.blogher.com/farewell-chinua-achebe

Jules Chametzky (Massachusetts Review):
https://www.massreview.org/blog/tribute-chinua-achebe

Jacket of the 1958 Heinemann edition