Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

A Routledge Study Guide

David Whittaker, Mpalive-Hangson Msiska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134286478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Offering an insight into African culture that had not been portrayed before, Things Fall Apart is both a tragic and moving story of an individual set in the wider context of the coming of colonialism, as well as a powerful and complex political statement of cross-cultural encounters.

This guide to Chinua Achebe's compelling novel offers:

• an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of Things Fall Apart
• a critical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present
• a selection of critical writing on Things Fall Apart, by Abiola Irele, Abdul JanMohamed, Biodun Jeyifo, Florence Stratton and Ato Quayson, providing a variety of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key critical approaches identified in the survey section
• cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism
• suggestions for further reading.

Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Things Fall Apart and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Achebe's text.

1
Text and contexts

The author

Albert Chinualumogo Achebe, as he was originally christened, was born into an Igbo family on 16 November 1930 in Ogidi, in what is now eastern Nigeria. His father, Isaiah Okafor Achebe, had been converted to Christianity as a young man, and both his parents were devout Christians. Although Isaiah Achebe had become an evangelizing church catechist and a teacher for the Church Missionary Society, the young Chinua grew up in a community in which many people still lived a traditional way of life. Chinua was to have a strict Christian upbringing, but he also grew up surrounded by neighbours and an extended family who continued to practise the Igbo traditional religion and observe the various rituals and festivals of the culture. In his autobiographical essay ‘Named for Victoria, Queen of England’ (1973), Achebe has described some of his earliest memories of growing up in Ogidi in the 1930s:

We lived at the crossroads of cultures. We still do today; but when I was a boy one could see and sense the peculiar quality and atmosphere of it more clearly … On one arm of the cross we sang hymns and read the Bible night and day. On the other my father’s brother and his family, blinded by heathenism, offered food to idols … What I do remember is a fascination for the ritual and the life on the other arm of the crossroads.¹

The perceived distinction between ‘heathen’ and Christian cultures was by no means absolute for the young Achebe, as he has recently described:

Both my parents were strong and even sometimes uncompromising in their Christian beliefs, but they were not fanatical … My father’s halfbrother was not the only heathen in our extended family; if anything, he was among a majority. Our home was open to them all, and my father received his peers and relatives – Christian or not – with kola nut and palm-wine.²

The important question of Achebe’s relationship with traditional Igbo culture, and the influence of his Christian upbringing, is one that we shall return to in more detail later in this chapter when we look at the cultural contexts of his life and work (see Texts and contexts, pp. 26–33).

Achebe undertook his early education in church schools at Ogidi and Nekede, and he went on to win a scholarship to study at the prestigious Government College in Umuahia, where he was a secondary school student between 1944 and 1948. Among those who attended the college during this period were Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike, Gabriel Okara, Elechi Amadi and Christopher Okigbo, all of whom were later to become major Nigerian writers. Achebe was a gifted student and he was awarded a scholarship to study medicine at the first university to be established in Nigeria, the newly founded University College in Ibadan, which at that time was a constituent college of the University of London. After his first year of studies Achebe decided to switch courses to study English Literature, Religious Studies and History. As part of his English Literature course, which had a curriculum similar to that of a contemporary British university, he studied the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Defoe, Swift, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, Eliot, Frost, Joyce and Hemingway as well as literature which was considered relevant to Nigerian students, such as the ‘African novels’ of Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene and Joyce Cary. Achebe’s reaction to the derogatory and demeaning portrayals of Africans in these novels was to have a profound influence on his later writing (see Texts and contexts, pp. 18–21). It was also during this period at university in Ibadan that Achebe first began writing essays, humorous sketches and short stories for various student magazines.

Achebe obtained an honours degree in English in 1953, and after a short period of working as a teacher he became an editor for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), where he was to hold various senior positions until the Biafran crisis in 1966. It was during his early years working at the NBC that Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart. He travelled to London in 1956 to attend a training course at the BBC where his manuscript came to the attention of one of his course tutors, the novelist and literary critic George Phelps, who recognized the quality of Achebe’s writing and recommended it for publication. Things Fall Apart was first published in London by Heinemann on 17 June 1958. Although the novel was met with some initial critical scepticism, it has gone on to receive considerable critical and popular acclaim around the world. Chinua Achebe’s pre-eminent position in the field of Nigerian and African literature was established with the publication of his first novel, and his reputation has only grown in the decades since his most famous work first appeared. Achebe’s second novel, No Longer at Ease (1960), was set in the contemporary world of 1950s Lagos and has as its protagonist Obi Okonkwo, the grandson of Things Fall Apart’s main character, Okonkwo. Achebe was to publish two other novels in this period, Arrow of God (1964) and A Man of the People (1966), as well as a collection of his short stories The Sacrificial Egg and Other Short Stories (1962), and a work for children Chike and the River (1966).

At the time of writing Things Fall Apart in the 1950s the young Achebe was deeply influenced by the growing pan-Nigerian nationalist movement in the colony, a political sentiment that was shared by many of Nigeria’s educated elite. As in many of the British colonies across West Africa, Nigerian nationalists optimistically looked forward to the day when the country would become a selfdetermining nation and gain its independence from British colonial rule. The anticolonial nationalist movement, and a concomitant form of cultural nationalism, had been gaining considerable strength and support in Nigeria in the years after the Second World War, and were to prove a crucial influence on Achebe’s writing. This is an important area of influence on Achebe’s work that will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter (see Texts and contexts, pp. 22–26). Achebe was eventually able to join in the national euphoria that attended the celebrations for Nigerian independence on 1 October 1960. The event was an undoubtedly momentous occasion in modern African history, not only for the fact that one out of every seven Africans had been liberated from colonial rule, for it also witnessed the creation of Africa’s largest and most populous new nation-state.

By 1966, however, the situation in the country had reached a crisis point, with political and ethnic tensions in the republic having led to a military coup and the massacre of thousands of easterners, predominantly but not exclusively Igbos, in northern and western Nigeria. The growing instability in Nigeria, together with the decision of the newly created state of Biafra in eastern Nigeria to secede, sparked the devastating Nigerian Civil War. Like many educated Igbos, Achebe came to support the secessionist state of Biafra, and played a prominent role in the new government, often travelling the world as an ambassador for the Biafran cause. The whole country was traumatized by the years of fighting, which ended only in 1970 with the defeat of the Biafran government and army. Achebe was deeply affected by the war, and particularly by the loss of many friends and acquaintances, including his close friend the poet Christopher Okigbo who was killed in the fighting. He spent most of the next few decades writing and teaching in universities in America and Nigeria. It was to take Achebe twenty-one years before he published another major work, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), which is his last novel to be published. The intervening years were not idle ones, however, for he also published a number of collections of his essays, short stories, poetry and children’s stories and edited the magazine Okike and a number of anthologies of African fiction. One of his most important achievements during this period, in terms of the promotion and dissemination of African literature, was his work as Series Editor for Heinemann’s African Writers Series between 1962 and 1990. In 1990 Achebe was involved in a car accident in Nigeria that left him with serious back injuries that have since confined him to a wheelchair. Since this time he has mostly lived in America, although he has remained active in Nigeria’s political and cultural life, and he continues to write and give lectures around the world.

The text

Things Fall Apart is not a lengthy novel, being approximately one hundred and fifty pages in length, and one of the principal reasons for this brevity is that Achebe originally conceived it as being only the first part of a much longer narrative. This more ambitious work was to follow three successive generations of the same family, and span the period from before the arrival of the British colonialists through to the contemporary world of colonial Nigeria in the 1950s. Realizing that the first section of this longer work was actually a self-contained narrative, one which functioned in its own terms, Achebe decided to divide his manuscript into two separate works, which were eventually to become his first two published novels: Things Fall Apart (1958) and No Longer at Ease (1960).

Delineating a brief outline of the plot of Things Fall Apart reveals a relatively simple storyline: the narrative begins in the late nineteenth century, at a time before Europeans had begun to colonize systematically the interior of West Africa. The protagonist of the novel, Okonkwo, is a renowned, if deeply flawed, member of a traditional Igbo village, in what is now south-eastern Nigeria. A combination of hubris and misfortune leads to Okonkwo and his family being banished from the village for seven years. The intervening years prove to be epochal ones for the village, for the British colonialists have arrived in his absence and introduced their own system of law and government, and missionaries have begun to convert people to the Christian religion. When Okonkwo returns from exile he is dismayed by the changes he finds. He advocates armed resistance to the newcomers and in a fit of pique he murders a court messenger in order to spark off an insurrection. When he realizes that his fellow villagers will not join him and rise up against the invaders, he commits suicide in despair. This cursory synopsis of the novel’s central plot does not do justice to the complexity of the work, however, for Things Fall Apart has a narrative structure which has numerous digressions and explications, all of which are germane to an understanding of the text.

The novel has a tripartite structure: Part One is by far the longest, with thirteen chapters, and introduces Okonkwo and his family, describes the culture and customs of Umuofia, and concludes with his exile from the clan; Part Two has six chapters, and covers Okonkwo’s years of exile and the initial arrival of the white man; while Part Three again has six chapters, and details Okonkwo’s return from exile, the changes that have occurred in his village with the coming of the European colonizers, and ends with his demise. Part One of the novel is not only the longest section of the narrative, it also provides much of the background material which is crucial to our understanding of Okonkwo, the culture which produced him, and the ultimate tragedy of his suicide. The narrative structure and temporal arrangement of this first section of the novel is not linear, however, as it tends to be circuitous, moving backwards and forwards in time as the narrative unfolds.

A closer examination of the novel’s first chapter will illuminate this point: Okonkwo is introduced at the height of his fame, when he is approximately forty years of age, although the story is initially set in the past, and is in turn related to a more distant historical and mythical era. The first two paragraphs describe the eighteen-year-old Okonkwo and his wrestling prowess while the third gives a physical description of him as a forty-year-old adult. The fourth paragraph moves back in time again to the death of his father Unoka ten years previously, and then the fifth provides a description of Unoka’s love of drinking and music before moving back further to his childhood. The sixth paragraph returns to Unoka’s adult years and a description of him as an irresponsible debtor. The next four paragraphs relate a story of his refusal to repay a debt to his friend Okoye that is set in a time parallel to Okonkwo’s early adulthood. The final paragraph of this four-page chapter returns again to Unoka’s death, to Okonkwo’s achievements, and looks forward to the fate of Ikemefuna, the young boy from a nearby village who has joined Okonkwo’s family. The following twelve chapters, which comprise the rest of Part One, return to a number of these events in considerably more detail, but not in the same order as they are first presented. Much of this first section of the novel is also taken up with a description of some of the central preoccupations in the lives of Okonkwo’s clan. A considerable amount of the narrative is devoted to descriptions of the crops of Umuofia, their cultivation and harvesting, as well the various festivals that accompany these important agricultural activities. Part One of the novel also provides descriptions of a number of important social events, rituals and ceremonies in the village such as marriages, funerals, and the convening of the court of the egwugwus.

The organization of the first section of the text lacks the narrative and temporal linearity that one is accustomed to in ‘classic’ European realist fiction, with only a small amount of the narrative being devoted to the development of the central plot. In an essay which we have included in the Critical readings section of this volume, the critic Abdul JanMohamed observes that ‘Out of the one-hundred-and-eighteen pages that comprise part one of the novel only about eight are devoted, strictly speaking, to the development of the plot.’³ This concentration on ‘background’ cultural information and various sub-plots dominates much of the narrative in the novel, as Robert M. Wren points out:

In page count, the marriage group (wedding and family chapters together) take up more than a quarter of the novel, and in them there is virtually no plot progression whatever. The chapters on the agricultural year, including the account of Okonkwo’s disastrous beginnings as a farmer, amount to one fifth of the novel. The white man and his religion are dominant in about one third of the novel – almost all of Parts Two and Three. Through most of the novel Okonkwo is passive or subordinate, though he is the link that holds it all together.⁴

The circumlocutory narrative and temporal trajectories evident in the first section of the novel have a counterpart in the Igbos’ highly prized rhetorical techniques, as Achebe indicates early on in the novel: ‘Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten. Okoye was a great talker and he spoke for a long time, skirting round the subject and then hitting it finally’ (Ch. 1, p. 5).⁵ Like Okoye, the narrator in Part One of Things Fall Apart employs periphrasis (a roundabout way of speaking) to circle around the subject, gradually building up a picture of Okonkwo and the culture in which he is situated. With the arrival of the British colonizers and missionaries in Part Two, while Okonkwo is in exile in Mbanta, the plot becomes decidedly more linear and the pace of the narrative quickens for the last third of the novel. It is as if the plot mirrors the rapid decline and destruction of the culture that Achebe so lucidly represents in the first section.

At the heart of the novel is the story of Okonkwo, one of the most compelling fictional creations in all of modern African literature. At the beginning of the narrative Okonkwo is described as a potentially powerful individual in a society that highly values physical vigour, wealth and courage:

Okonkwo was clearly cut out for great things. He was still young but he had won fame as the greatest wrestler in the nine villages. He was a wealthy farmer and had two barns full of yams, and had just married his third wife. To crown it all he had taken two titles and had shown incredible prowess in two inter-tribal wars. And so although Okonkwo was still young, he was already one of the greatest men of his time. Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered.

(Ch. 1, p. 6)

Okonkwo’s high status in the community is measured exclusively in relation to his success in the male realms of wrestling and warfare, and against the culture’s patriarchal system of sanctioning titles, polygyny (men having more than one wife) and wealth accumulation. Even his ability as a farmer is demonstrated by his success in growing a staple vegetable which has been culturally reified with a gender bias: ‘Yam stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed’ (Ch. 1, p. 24).

Okonkwo appears to be a man destined for greatness as a result of his conformity to his society’s ideals of masculinity and patriarchal hegemony, although no sooner are we made aware of his potentially iconic status than we are informed that he is a deeply flawed individual:

He was tall and huge, and his bushy eyebrows and wide nose gave him a severe look … When he walked, his heels hardly touched the ground and he seemed to walk on springs, as if he was going to pounce on somebody. And he did pounce on people quite often. He had a slight stammer and whenever he was angry and could not get his words out quickly enough, he would use his fists.

(Ch. 1, p. 1)

In the oral culture of Umuofia, in which ‘the art of conversation is regarded very highly’ (Ch. 1, p. 5),⁶ Okonkwo’s incompetence at verbal communication, volatility and propensity for violence are personal flaws, which Achebe is careful to portray as alienating him from the very values in his culture which he espouses. Early on in the novel he is shown to be overzealous in his patriarchal position within the family: ‘Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, e...