Introduction
Things Fall Apart is the first novel by famed Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. It was published in 1958 and is set in an unspecified year late in the 19th century. It’s a classic of African literature, and regularly appears on lists of all-time great novels. You can find the text online here.
Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart to show the humanity of the Igbo and their vibrant culture, in contrast to authors such as Joseph Conrad, whom he felt treated Africans as savage, undifferentiated, and subhuman. And so Things Fall Apart focuses, to a greater extent than on plot, on depicting what life was like for the Igbo. The nine-village cluster of Umuofia is remarkable, populated by forgotten superweapons, undying fetal tormentors, and gods born of human sacrifice.
While the specific events of the novel are fiction, they tell a very real story of the arrival of Christianity and the changes that ensued. From that story, we can learn universal lessons about how social orders clash, and get a fascinating peek at a culture quite unlike our own.
Characters and Plot
Things Fall Apart follows the life of Okonkwo, a former champion wrestler and now a prosperous farmer among his agriculturalist people in Umuofia. Okonkwo’s success stems from his hard work and drive to succeed, and those in turn stem from his abject terror at turning out like his father, a lazy debtor with love for music instead of violence. He conceptualizes what he despises about his father in terms of femininity, in contrast with his violent and unyielding notion of masculinity. Some passages describing Okonkwo:
He had a slight stammer and whenever he was angry and could not get his words out quickly enough, he would use his fists.
Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives […] 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 fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father. […] 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.
Okonkwo never showed any emotion openly, unless it be the emotion of anger. To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength.
No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man.
Folks, meet our protagonist.
The inciting event of the book is the murder of a woman of Umuofia by someone from the nearby clan of Mbaino. As a champion fighter of the village, Okonkwo is dispatched to demand, on threat of war, compensation in the form of a virgin and a young man. Mbaino, knowing they’re in the wrong and martially (and magically) outmatched by Umuofia, yield. Okonkwo soon returns with the tribute. While the virgin goes to replace the murdered woman, it’s decided that the young man, a fifteen-year-old named Ikemefuna, will live with Okonkwo until the clan decides what to do with him.
Ikemefuna becomes Okonkwo’s adoptive son. He befriends Okonkwo’s sensitive son Nwoye, whom Okonkwo disdains, and in time even Okonkwo grows fond of Ikemefuna. But three years after Okonkwo takes Ikemefuna into his household, he is informed that Agbala, the Oracle of the Hills and Caves, the tutelary god of Umuofia who speaks through his priestess Chielo, has decreed that Ikemefuna is to be taken outside of Umuofia and killed. Ezeudu, an elder of Umuofia, informs Okonkwo of this, but warns him, “That boy calls you father. Do not bear a hand in his death.” Nonetheless, Okonkwo insists on going along. After the first blow doesn’t kill Ikemefuna, he runs to Okonkwo for help, and Okonkwo panics and strikes him down.
When he returns home, Nwoye breaks down, and remembers another act of the clan that he cannot accept, the abandoning of newborn twins in the forest to die. Okonkwo too is devastated, falling into a stupor for several days, until his bravado eventually manages to incorporate this latest act. He reasons “How can a man who has killed five men in battle fall to pieces because he has added a boy to their number? Okonkwo, you have become a woman indeed.” He goes to visit his friend Obierika, whose daughter is getting married, mocks him for not going along on the trip to kill Ikemefuna, and witnesses negotiation over the bride-price.
That night, Okonkwo’s favorite child, a sickly but sharp ten-year-old daughter named Ezinma (who Okonkwo regularly wishes were a son) falls badly ill, and her mother, Ekwefi, Okonkwo’s second wife, thinks she may be dying. For this child, Okonkwo reacts properly. He springs into action, gathering medicinal plants and brewing a treatment for her. Her fever breaks, and she begins to recover. But very soon after, Chielo, the priestess, comes to take Ezinma to the shrine of the Oracle. Ekwefi, frantic for her only surviving child’s safety, follows Chielo, and Okonkwo also follows. Neither one is quite sure what they can do, since the Oracle and hence Chielo are immensely feared, but fortunately, the next morning Chielo returns Ezinma unharmed. We never do learn why she took Ezinma or what transpired in the subterranean shrine.
Not long after the wedding of Obierika’s daughter, Ezeudu — who had warned Okonkwo against involvement in the killing of Ikemefuna — dies. His funeral is a grand occasion, with masked spirits commemorating his life, and raucous demonstrations with machetes and guns to celebrate his success as a warrior. However, Okonkwo’s gun explodes in his hand and a fragment of it strikes and kills one of Ezeudu’s sons. The penalty for accidentally killing another member of the clan is seven years banishment, and so Okonkwo and his family are exiled to Mbanta, the village his mother hailed from.
After a pep talk from his uncle Uchendu, Okonkwo is determined to make the most of these seven years in Mbanta. But changes are coming to the Igbo. Two years into his exile, Obierika comes to visit his friend, and reports that the Abame clan has been wiped out. A strange white man appeared in a village of that clan, and the Oracle of Abame warned them that he heralded great destruction, so they killed him. In classic self-fulfilling prophecy style, this provokes retaliation: three other white men and some allies of theirs launch an ambush on the market of Abame, killing anyone there. Okonkwo reacts with his usual belligerence and scorn for the insufficiently martial people of Abame, but Obierika and Uchendu are more philosophical:
“They have paid for their foolishness,” said Obierika. “But I am greatly afraid. We have heard stories about white men who made the powerful guns and the strong drinks and took slaves away across the seas, but no one thought the stories were true.”
“There is no story that is not true,” said Uchendu. “The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others. We have albinos among us. Do you think that they came to our clan by mistake, that they have strayed from their way to a land where everybody is like them?”
[…]
“That is the money from your yams,” [Obierika] said. […] “Who knows what may happen tomorrow? Perhaps green men will come to our clan and shoot us.”
Two years later, the intent of the white men has become clearer. They have come to establish their religion, Christianity. A white missionary by the name of Mr. Brown is settling among the Igbo. Though he’s considered foolish and his religion crazy, he’s tolerated, and he and his interpreter, Mr. Kiaga, set up churches in Mbanta and Umuofia. Their message and alternative path gradually win converts among those dissatisfied with the status quo — including Nwoye, Okonkwo’s son, who remembers well the slaying of Ikemefuna. Okonkwo rejects him, and Nwoye leaves to join the Christians. Eventually, he will be rechristened Isaac, and become the father of Obi, the protagonist of the sequel No Longer at Ease. Okonkwo pushes for a violent response to the Christians for the rest of his time in Mbanta, and eventually his exile comes to an end, an event he celebrates with a great feast.
Things have changed back in Umuofia, as Okonkwo discovers when he returns. The white men haven’t just set up a church, they’ve brought a trading post and set up a government, led by a District Commissioner. They don’t have general authority yet, but are becoming arbiters of more and more. Obierika laments how the clan has become divided:
“The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”
Mr. Brown finds great success as a missionary and educator, and his respect for the Igbo is returned in kind. But eventually, his health fails and he is forced to return to England. His successor, Mr. Smith, is a fundamentalist with no tolerance for the local traditions, and under his stewardship, the more fanatical Christians are emboldened. One of them, a convert named Enoch, attacks an embodied ancestral spirit, and in retaliation, the people and spirits of Umuofia destroy the church. Okonkwo is pleased that they have finally taken action, though he wishes it had been more violent.
But this action draws the ire of the colonial authority. The District Commissioner invites leaders of Umuofia to meet with him, then has them arrested. Contrary to his lofty words and possibly his orders, the prisoners are mistreated by the guards, men from the Umuru clan where the English are most established. Eventually, the people of Umuofia pay a sizable fine and Okonkwo and the others are released.
Umuofia then meets to discuss what to do. Okonkwo, incensed at his treatment, hopes for a war, and intends to fight no matter what the clan decides. At the meeting, another leader of the village who was held prisoner also urges war, but is interrupted by the arrival of a delegation from the colonial authority, who order the meeting to stop. Okonkwo recognizes the leader as one of the guards from his imprisonment and beheads the man, but then realizes that the clan will not follow him to war.
Soon, the District Commissioner arrives himself with a contingent of soldiers, seeking Okonkwo. He is informed by a distraught Obierika that Okonkwo has killed himself, and Obierika asks him cut down Okonkwo’s body and dispose of it, because people who die by suicide are unclean and may not be buried with the clan. The District Commissioner agrees, and reflects to himself on how primitive he finds the Igbo.
Life in Umuofia
Language
The Igbo language is rich with metaphors and proverbs, which Achebe endeavors to interpret to English. (When asked why he wrote the novel in English, Achebe explained that the Igbo written language was stiff and artificial as a result of its recent codification by missionaries.) Some examples include:
- “The lizard that jumped from the high iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no one else did” — Essentially “Apologies for tooting my own horn.”
- “As the elders said, if one finger brought oil it soiled the others” — Akin to the idiom one bad apple spoils the whole barrel.
- “Never kill a man who says nothing. Those men of Abame were fools. What did they know about the man?” [Uchendu] ground his teeth again and told a story to illustrate his point. “Mother Kite once sent her daughter to bring food. She went, and brought back a duckling. ‘You have done very well, […] but tell me, what did the mother of this duckling say when you swooped and carried its child away?’ ‘It said nothing,’ replied the young kite. ‘It just walked away.’ ‘You must return the duckling,’ said Mother Kite. ‘There is something ominous behind the silence. […] There is nothing to fear from someone who shouts.’”
- “I cannot live on the bank of a river and wash my hands with spittle.”
The use of commonly-known stories is not so strange. It’s reminiscent of the famous Star Trek episode Darmok, which depicts a society that communicates exclusively in these allusive metaphors and stories, but also of modern internet culture, where memes and references fill a similar role.
Spirit Masquerades
In Umuofia, the spirits are present not only in, well, spirit, but also in physical form. For ceremonial occasions, egwugwu — raffia (palm fiber) and wood costumes that embody the spirits — emerge into the village. We see them at funerals, religious celebrations, and serving as the supreme judges of conflict between villagers. The egwugwu represent ancestors, avatars of the land itself, and other less-defined things. Bearing one is a great honor, which is assigned through an unspecified process that seems to involve talent at representing that specific spirit. People may know who is underneath the costumes, but the masquerade is its own entity, separate from its bearer, and to conflate the two is a grave offense:
Okonkwo’s wives, and perhaps other women as well, might have noticed that the second egwugwu had the springy walk of Okonkwo. And they might also have noticed that Okonkwo was not among the titled men and elders who sat behind the row of egwugwu, But if they thought these things they kept them within themselves. The egwugwu with the springy walk was one of the dead fathers of the clan.
Egwugwu have various behaviors and powers. A certain dreaded one, evocative of death, can freeze other egwugwu in place for days. Some are aggressive, and one machete-wielding egwugwu at Ezeudu’s funeral is led on ropes to restrain it. While this one is just play-acting, crimes against religious norms are sometimes punished by egwugwu, such as the horde that destroys the church in retaliation for one of the converts unmasking (and therefore killing) one of their number.
Interactions with egwugwu are highly ritualized on both sides. They all refer to people as “bodies,” e.g., “Uzowulu’s body.” Many have dances or songs specific to them and the role they fill in the religion. For quite a few, women and children are not supposed to look at them. I’ve encountered egwugwu on my trip to Gambia. I remember a red one led by a group of children. It had a blank mask made of coins and it might have been wielding machetes. It came up to us as we were walking along a road, and my girlfriend told me that the proper protocol for this one was to give some money to the children accompanying it.
There are other variants of spirit masquerades besides egwugwu, such as fangboni, kankurang, mamapara, and kumpo. I would argue that there’s another example that may be more familiar to readers of this review: Santa Claus. Santa is a supernatural entity embodied by a human in a very specific costume. You might recognize the fellow in the Santa costume, but it would be incredibly rude to publicly identify them, or to shout that Santa isn’t real. Interactions with Santa follow a ritual script (“Have you been a good little boy/girl?”, “What do you want for Christmas?”) and Santa, through his role in Christmas, is ascribed certain specific powers such as traveling the world in a single night and distributing presents. The elves too are part of the masquerade, though in a more liminal role, wearing less concealing costumes and being more allowed to break character to facilitate and protect the masquerade of Santa Claus.
Infant Mortality
One of the great marvels of modern medicine is the drastic reduction in infant and child mortality. Historically, as many as half of all children died before adulthood, and half of those died in their first year of life. Things Fall Apart doesn’t provide the statistics for Umuofia, but the picture it paints is one of pervasive, grinding loss.
Ekwefi, Okonkwo’s second wife, has had nine children before Ezinma, but none of them have survived much beyond three years. In a heart-rending passage, Achebe relates her anguish:
As she buried one child after another, her sorrow gave way to despair and then to grim resignation. The birth of her children, which should be a woman’s crowning glory, became for Ekwefi mere physical agony devoid of promise. The naming ceremony after seven market weeks became an empty ritual. Her deepening despair found expression in the names she gave her children. One of them was a pathetic cry, Onwumbiko — “Death, I implore you.” But Death took no notice; Onwumbiko died in his fifteenth month. The next child was a girl, Ozoemena — “May it not happen again.” She died in her eleventh month, and two others after her. Ekwefi then became defiant and called her next child Onwuma — “Death may please himself.” And he did.
It’s not just her. Okonkwo’s uncle, Uchendu, tells him that he has had to bury twenty-two of his children. The attentive reader will also notice that the name Ozoemena is familiar — the wife of an old man who dies earlier in the book is also named Ozoemena. Making matters worse for some Igbo mothers is the law that twins are an abomination unto the Earth and must be left to die. One of Uchendu’s daughters has borne several sets of twins, and a woman Nneka who joins the Christians has given birth to twins on all four of her pregnancies. That exposing the twins is religiously mandated doesn’t make it less painful for these women.
There is an extensive tradition around the death of children. Ekwefi is believed to be plagued by an ogbanje, an evil entity that torments a woman by deliberately dying and then reincarnating as her next child, again and again. The cycle of death and rebirth that ogbanje abuse is made possible by an iyi-uwa, a magical stone that acts as a tether to the spirit realm — in effect, a lich’s phylactery or one of Voldermort’s horcruxes. A medicine man specializing in ogbanje children tries to assist Ekwefi with her problem. He advises her on ways to elude the ogbanje’s attention, and when that doesn’t work, mutilates the corpse of the stubborn changeling and gives it a dishonorable burial to discourage it from returning. When Ezinma is finally born and seems likely to survive, having reached age nine despite her sickly constitution, the medicine man confronts her and compels her to lead him to where her iyi-uwa is hidden. Ezinma eventually leads him to a place near her home where he uncovers a deeply buried, polished pebble. Her family rejoices, because it is clear from this that Ezinma, the redeemed ogbanje, has finally chosen to stay.
Miscellany
When locusts descend upon Umuofia, they are welcomed. There’s not concern that the swarm will eat the crops — instead they’re treated as a rare and tasty delicacy. They’re collected at night in vast numbers after dew condenses on their wings and slows their ability to fly, then roasted, sun-dried, and eaten with palm oil. Curiously, despite this wholly positive experience with locusts, when Okonkwo’s friend Obierika explains why the men of Abame killed the white man who visited their village, he says that their Oracle told them “that other white men were on the way. They were locusts, it said, and that first man was their harbinger sent to explore the terrain. And so they killed him.” I’m not sure how to reconcile this reference to locusts as an all-consuming swarm with all the previous mentions of locusts being a joyous and remarkable bounty.
One of Okonkwo’s formative memories is of his fellow kids mocking his father as an agbala, a word that refers to either a woman or a man who has failed to claim any title. From context, it’s not an admirable thing for a man to be an agbala. However, the Oracle spirit that Chielo serves as the priestess and mouthpiece of is named Agbala, and is referred to as “he” (or more rarely as “it”). And that deific Oracle is greatly respected: “No one who had ever crawled into his awful shrine had come out without the fear of his power.” I’m not sure whether this is a case of the English transliteration squashing two words together, or whether the revered and clearly male Agbala is given an effeminate name ironically or as some odd form of respect, akin to nicknaming a successful male soldier “Sissy.”
Medicine — magical charms and constructs — can take a wide range of forms. Multiple powerful medicines are described as taking the form of an old woman: the war-medicine of Umuofia was an old woman with one leg, and the medicine fueling the market of Umuike is an old woman bearing a fan. The forests are filled with old medicine, such as the ancient and now uncontrolled weapon Ogbu-agali-odu, remembered by Ekwefi as a floating light in the woods. Abandoned medicine is also part of what makes the Evil Forest evil — it serves as “the dumping ground for the potent fetishes of great medicine men when they died.” Many of the capabilities of the white men and their followers, such as their stealth in setting up the massacre of Abame, are attributed to them having very powerful medicine.
As in every society throughout history, the elders grouse about “kids these days.” Uchendu feels that the connections among the Igbo are weakening. “Those were good days when a man had friends in distant clans,” he says. “Your generation does not know that. You stay at home, afraid of your next-door neighbor.” At the feast Okonkwo throws as he leaves Mbanta, one old relative of his makes a similar complaint of atomization: “I fear for you young people because you do not understand how strong is the bond of kinship. You do not know what it is to speak with one voice.” Okonkwo too reminisces about a glorious past “when men were men” and willing to wage war (though Igbo wars seem surprisingly low in casualties — the one against the Isike Okonkwo is remembering had a fatality rate of less than one person per day). Naturally, in one of the sequels, No Longer at Ease, Okonkwo’s much-despised son Nwoye himself laments the foolishness of the next generation.
The Rise of Christianity
How did Christianity become a competitor to the established and powerful Igbo religion?
When the missionaries first come to Mbanta and request land on which to build their church, rather than turn them away outright, Uchendu suggests that they be given a plot in the Evil Forest. The Igbo religion holds that the Evil Forest is full of dangerous spirits and medicine, but this is not actually the case, and neither does that belief reflect an underlying imminent danger. The missionaries are able to build a church there without incident. As the days pass and the missionaries continue to avoid being struck down by vengeful gods and ancestors, the people of Mbanta assume that this shows that Christianity is real and incredibly powerful, rather than that neither religion reflects the truth of the world. Impressed by the survival of the Christians, a number of people join them.
In Umuofia, Chielo dismisses the converts as the “excrement of the clan,” and says that Christianity is “a mad dog that had come to eat it up.” At the start, no titled man joins the religion. Instead, the first converts to Christianity are the people most left out by traditional Igbo society. The first woman to join the movement is Nneka, who has given birth to twins on each of her four pregnancies, and is regarded negatively by her family for this failing. Pregnant for a fifth time, and fearful of once more having to sacrifice her children, she jumps at the first alternative available. Nwoye has never forgiven his father for killing Ikemefuna, nor the Oracle for commanding it, and he is still profoundly disturbed by the edict against twins. Accordingly, he eagerly joins the Christians, which also allows him to find an authority less punishing than his brutal father. Indeed, the Christians rescue abandoned twins from the forest, which the Igbo grudgingly tolerate.
Most controversially, the Christians welcome osu, outcast slaves of the gods. Even most of the converts reject these osu as fundamentally unclean. One explains that osu are “a thing set apart — a taboo forever, and his children after him. […] An osu could not attend an assembly of the freeborn, and they, in turn, could not shelter under his roof. […] When he died he was buried by his kind in the Evil Forest. How could such a man be a follower of Christ?” Mr. Kiaga, the missionary, calmly replies that “He needs Christ more than you and I.” Tragically, while Mr. Kiaga’s resolve is enough to impel the fledgling mission to accept osu converts, who soon become among the most zealous, the prejudice against them continues among Christian Igbo, and features as a major element of the plot of No Longer at Ease.
To win over more prominent figures in the Igbo community, the missionaries need to offer something besides acceptance. Mr. Brown offers them knowledge. He sets up a school teaching English, reading, and writing, and makes the case to the people of Umuofia that the future will belong to people who can use these powerful tools. Of course, the education includes a religious element; the two are presented as different facets of the white man’s medicine. The lure of influence in the burgeoning order encourages a growing swath of the clan to convert.
There are no kings among the Igbo, who follow a more democratic, consensus-based approach to governance. As a result, there’s no central authority to push forcefully back against the Christians. By the time they realize the strength of the competition, Christianity has gained enough converts that no consensus against it can be formed. As many characters observe, the clan can no longer act as one.
This is not a story of Christianity spreading by the sword. While the English are willing to use disproportionate force reactively, we never see them proactively turn to violence. For the most part, the Christians and the followers of the Igbo religion are happy to coexist. However, both have extremists who are spoiling for a fight. Offenses against the Christians are punished, such as a man who killed a missionary being hanged, or the imprisonment of Okonkwo and others for tearing down the church. In contrast, when a Christian oversteps, such as when Okoli possibly kills the sacred python, or Enoch attacks an egwugwu, the colonial authority will not arrest them. Some of this is explicit bias on the part of the English against a people they see as primitive tribesmen, but some is also that they genuinely don’t (and won’t) understand that unmasking an egwugwu is a religious crime similar to destroying a church. The threat of the Christians mustering their power skews the playing field by preventing similar selective enforcement on the part of the Igbo.
If the religions of the English and the Igbo had been swapped, most of these factors would still have applied. Christianity is no better of a guide for identifying cursed terrain, and there are certainly people who would be stuck in terrible situations as a result of Christian religion who would find a lifeline in the Igbo traditional religion. The biased enforcement against religious offenses has nothing to do with the precepts of the religions and everything to do with the technological gap between the English and the Igbo. Things Fall Apart is a very specific book, but its lessons on how an order may be supplanted are universal.
A Metaphysical Reading
I believe that Achebe wrote this book with realism in mind. Nonetheless, it seems to me that there’s a defensible alternate reading in which the various religious beliefs are essentially true. Some events are explained most simply by this. For instance, the people of Mbanta attribute the spontaneous demise of Okoli, the former osu who may have killed a sacred python, to the gods having struck him down for his blasphemy. Through a lens that allows supernatural explanations, striking patterns emerge in Okonkwo’s experiences.
As events turn against him, Okonkwo reflects on the saying that “when a man says yes his chi [personal god] says yes also,” which has similar meaning to the English idiom that God helps those who help themselves. For all his faults, Okonkwo is a hard worker, so why does he face such setbacks? We can find the answer in the response Okonkwo’s father, Unoka, received when he went to the Oracle of the Hills and Caves to learn the source of his failures. The priestess tells him “When a man is at peace with his gods and his ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm.” Since Okonkwo’s harvest of misfortune is not due to the strength of his arm, we know it must be because he is not at peace with the gods and ancestors.
Okonkwo spends the book in struggle against Ani, the earth goddess, as a reflection of his disdain for femininity. He beats his youngest wife during the Week of Peace, a week sacred to Ani, and is warned by her priest that “The earth goddess whom you have insulted may refuse to give us her increase, and we shall all perish”. Though he makes the required penance offerings, he refuses to show contrition for fear of appearing weak. (Breaches of the mandated peace used to be punished by the offender being dragged to death, but this practice ended long ago in light of the fact that it was a pretty major breach of the peace itself.) When Okonkwo himself kills Ikemefuna, Obierika tells him that “What you have done will not please the Earth. It is the kind of action for which the goddess wipes out whole families.”
During the preparation for the Feast of the New Yam, a celebration of the earth goddess, Okonkwo’s anger boils over. After Okonkwo beats Ekwefi and she mutters a mocking comment about “guns that never shot,” Okonkwo grabs his gun and shoots at her! He misses, and as the man of the family, doesn’t face direct consequences. But the next time he holds a gun, at the funeral of Ezeudu, even though he does not intend to harm anyone, the gun explodes and kills Ezeudu’s son. As the text notes, funerals of old men are a time when the realms of the living and the spirits are closest together, so it is during a funeral that Okonkwo’s great fall begins with an echo of one of his unpunished wrongs. When Okonkwo is exiled and his compound razed, the friends of Okonkwo doing so know that “It was the justice of the earth goddess, and they were merely her messengers.”
We see the hand of the earth goddess in Okonkwo’s loss of Nwoye. Had Nwoye simply died, Okonkwo would have been able to bear the loss of a child he never liked. But Nwoye instead rejects Okonkwo and all that he stands for. And it is Ani who turns Nwoye’s heart against his father. Nwoye’s grievances against the Igbo religion are the throwing away of twins and the killing of Ikemefuna — both done on the command of the earth goddess (the latter through her messenger the Oracle).
Okonkwo’s end begins during a festival of the earth goddess, when Enoch unmasks an egwugwu, and starts the cycle of retaliation that culminates in Okonkwo hanging himself. Okonkwo’s greatest fear is ending up like his father. And though he does not realize it, Ani has brought him to that juncture. Unoka died of a disease that was an abomination against the Earth and so denied him a proper burial. In the end, through dying by suicide, Okonkwo shares his father’s fate — his corpse is an offense to the Earth that must be disposed of by the Christians he detests.
Questions
Is Things Fall Apart an Igbo nationalist work?
Like most countries made by the British, Nigeria was created without much concern for the ethnic, religious, or political affiliations of its inhabitants. The Igbo considered themselves a separate people, and nine years after the publication of Things Fall Apart (and seven years after the independence of Nigeria from British rule), the country ruptured into civil war as the Igbo tried to secede and form their own nation, Biafra. Achebe strongly supported Biafra, and later wrote a nonfiction book There Was a Country to commemorate Biafra and tell of his experience during the Nigerian Civil War.
Might Things Fall Apart have been intended to push back not just against Western depictions of Africans as uncivilized savages, but also against domestic attempts to flatten Nigeria into a single national identity? Was it written not only to tell the world “This is our culture!” but also to tell his fellow Igbo “This is your culture!”?
How would Achebe have fixed the problems with the traditional ways?
Things Fall Apart is intended to be an accurate portrayal of Igbo society and the arrival of the Europeans. To that end, while it’s definitely a work opposing to the colonization of Nigeria, it doesn’t wholly valorize the existing system, nor does it condemn the missionary efforts of Mr. Brown and Mr. Kiaga. Reading the book, I absolutely got the impression of an intensely complex and refined society, but also one full of really horrible stuff. Certain problems, such as rampant infant mortality and food insecurity, would be ameliorated by technological advances, but others are harder. For instance, abandoning twins is not justified as being the result of hardship, but rather is seen as a positive good. But the most severe problem in the traditional ways of Igbo society (with only the possible exception of the widespread mistreatment of women and children by cruel patriarchs like Okonkwo) is the practice of slavery.
Achebe only mentions slavery in passing in Things Fall Apart, but as you can read here in the New Yorker, it was widespread in Igbo society, featured elements such as hereditary caste and human sacrifice of slaves as a status symbol, and continued into the 20th century with its legacy persisting to the present day. As I mentioned, No Longer at Ease covers the ongoing prejudice against the former slave castes in more detail. Slavery wasn’t abolished that much later in Nigeria than it was here in the United States, but there was an abolitionist movement in the U.S. dating back to the country’s start. In the absence of outside intervention, was there a similar grassroots movement against slavery among the Igbo that could have ended the institution?
How had Igbo society already changed from past contact?
No one in Umuofia believes the stories of white men who came from far away with strange technologies. But certain items in the book reflect a long history of perhaps indirect trade with the Europeans. Many staple crops in Umuofia, such as cassava and corn, are native to the Americas. The Igbo know to ferment cassava to reduce its cyanide content, which suggests either that they were told to do so by whoever brought it there, or that they’ve had it for such a long a time that they discovered the plant’s subtle toxicity and found ways to counter it. Similarly, guns and tobacco very likely at some point passed through Europe, and both are now ingrained in the culture. How does Igbo society at the start of the book differ from how it would be in a world where they had never had contact with Europe or the Americas?
Conclusions
This is not a fun book. Chinua Achebe is an excellent writer, and the depiction of Igbo culture in Umuofia is fascinating, but the plot is meandering and Okonkwo is a truly repellent protagonist. It’s not long, and immensely dense with detail and texture, which my analysis here only provides a gloss on. I would recommend the book for the reader who wants to learn about the Igbo, or one who has a taste for classical tragedy. While I don’t think I enjoyed Things Fall Apart, I’m glad I read it.