Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Posted in Other fiction, Reading Reviewed at 19:30 on 10 March 2024
Penguin, 2010, 201 p. First published in 1958.
This is the book that announced Achebe to the world and became a catalyst for the consumption of African literature more widely.
The prose is composed almost entirely of Nigerian cadences; as is fitting since it depicts life in a rural Igbo (Achebe spells it Ibo) village on the cusp of colonial days.
Okonkwo is a self-made man, a yam farmer, a famous wrestler and warrior for his village, Umuofia. His own father, Unoka, had been a renowned wastrel and left Okonkwo with nothing. Okonkwo is terrified that his son Nwoye will be a wastrel too. This leads him to treat the boy harshly. Okonkwo is much more inclined to his daughter Ezinma, daughter of second wife, Ekwefi. (The first wife is never named, though his third, Ojiugo, is.) Okonkwo wishes that Ezinwa had been a boy.
Due to a dispute with a neighbouring village Okonkwo takes in as a hostage the boy Ikemefuna, supposedly for a few weeks but it goes on for three years. Ikemefuna forms a friendship with Nwoye and starts to call Okonkwo father. When the time comes for Ikemefuna’s punishment Okonkwo has a dilemma. As he does not want to seem weak he takes part in administering the harsh sentence. Here is the beginning of the unravelling.
This first part of the book is a portrait of Nigerian life in the old days where everything was done in the knowledge of the influence of the gods on daily life. Things had to be done just so to appease them, or to prevent their displeasure and in a domestic setting a man had also to be seen to be able to control his wives. Okonkwo controls both them and his family through violence. The mark must not be overstepped though.
Hence in part two Okonkwo has been forced by custom (and for various reasons) to go into exile in the village where his mother came from. He has to start all over again. By the time he returns to Umuofia missionaries have arrived and life is different. Theirs is in Okonkwo’s mind a lunatic religion but that does not stop it affecting village life and his family.
Science Fiction has a strand which attempts to portray alien cultures and habits, sometimes as a prelude to colonisation. In many ways reading those stories can act a primer for reading a book like this. But Achebe’s is of course a picture of a genuine way of living, and so more real, more consequential.
Things Fall Apart, immersed as it is in bygone Igbo life, is nevertheless as much a critique of unthinking (and unreflective) colonisers as it is a threnody for the old ways. But it also shows that lament for times past is not a trait restricted to Scottish literature.
Pedant’s corner:- guttural (several times; guttural,) “like a animal” (like an animal,) “they carried it down two trips to the steam” (to the stream,) “but everything was not expedient” (but not everything was expedient.)
Tags: Chinua Achebe, Literary Fiction, Nigerian Fiction, Things Fall Apart