Things Fall Apart

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1958

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-13

Chapters 14-16

Chapters 17-19

Chapters 20-22

Chapters 23-25

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Vocabulary

Essay Topics

Quiz

Background

Authorial Context: Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe is one of the world’s best-known African authors. Born in Nigeria in 1930, he belonged to the Igbo people, the same community at the center of Things Fall Apart (note that the book styles the tribal name as “Ibo”). Though born roughly 40 years after the events in Things Fall Apart, Achebe experienced firsthand many of the same political, cultural, and religious divides found at the heart of the novel. For example, around 1900, Achebe’s father, Isaiah, became one of his community’s earliest converts to Christianity. A Protestant who raised his son in the Christian Church, Isaiah nevertheless continued to honor the traditions of Odinani, his ancestors’ traditional faith. This balance between Western and African traditions is reflected in Achebe’s full name, Albert Chinualumogu Achebe. While Albert is a European name, Chinualumogu is a traditional Odinani prayer that means “God is fighting on my behalf.”

The author himself embodies this uneasy balance between Igbo traditions and the West. Achebe refused to go by Albert, changing his name to an abbreviation of his middle name, Chinua. Achebe’s rebellion against his Christian given name is an inversion of the relationship between Okonkwo and Nwoye, who contradicts his father by embracing Christianity. At the same time, Achebe chose to write in English, reflecting the influence of his education in Christian-run schools. As such, Things Fall Apart is very much a product of Achebe’s upbringing, which was marked by father-son tension as well as tension between tradition and modernity.

Literary Context: Postcolonial African Literature in the West

In the late 1950s, when Achebe sent Things Fall Apart to literary agents in London, virtually no Western publishing houses saw the global market potential of African literature. Most literature set in Africa that found mainstream success outside the continent was written by Westerners, such as Heart of Darkness author Joseph Conrad, whom Achebe refers to in his essay collection Hopes and Impediments as a “thoroughgoing racist.”

That changed when executives at the UK publishing house Heinemann chose to publish Things Fall Apart, reportedly without changing a single word. The critical and popular acclaim met by Things Fall Apart led Heinemann to launch its landmark African Writers’ Series, which between 1962 and 2002 published over 300 books by African writers, drawing international attention to African literature and launching the careers of Achebe, Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and other major 20th-century literary figures.

Meanwhile, the response to Things Fall Apart from fellow Africans and other voices writing from colonial or postcolonial perspectives is nuanced. On one hand, the book has garnered enormous praise and respect from individuals like Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, who called Things Fall Apart “the first novel in English which spoke from the interior of the African character, rather than portraying the African as an exotic, as the white man would see him” (“Chinua Achebe of Bard College.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 33, autumn 2001, pp. 28-29). On the other hand, Achebe’s decision to write in English is a source of controversy. The debate over whether colonized people should use their colonizers’ language to tell their stories lies at the heart of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1986 book Decolonising the Mind, another entry in Heinemann’s African Writers’ Series.

Achebe’s reaction to these critiques was twofold. For one, he believed that his native Igbo language was already too corrupted by British missionaries, who standardized Igbo’s numerous dialects into one uniform language. This version, Achebe said, “cannot sing. There’s nothing you can do with it to make it sing. It’s heavy. It’s wooden” (Brooks, Jerome. “Chinua Achebe, The Art of Fiction No. 139.” The Paris Review, no. 133, winter 1994). Second, Achebe believed that English is a “powerful weapon” for subverting colonialism and postcolonialism, adding, “English is something you spend your lifetime acquiring, so it would be foolish not to use it” (Bacon, Katie. “An African Voice.” The Atlantic, Aug. 2000).

Sociohistorical Context: Nigeria’s Colonial History

In considering the narrative’s social and cultural tensions, it is crucial to examine Nigeria’s colonial history and the era when Things Fall Apart is set. By the late 19th century, with US slavery abolished, Europe could no longer rely on cheap raw materials cultivated through slave labor in America. This caused countries like Great Britain to seek colonial footholds in Africa, where they could establish local trade networks designed to benefit European markets. These efforts were formalized at the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, where European powers reached various lateral agreements to invade, occupy, partition, and colonize Africa. In a reflection of how fully realized these ambitions became, the area of Africa under European control rose from 10% in 1870 to 90% in 1914.

Roughly in the middle of that period is when Things Fall Apart takes place, as missionaries moved further inland to lay what they believed to be the cultural and religious groundwork for colonization to take hold. Ten years later, in 1900, the territory seized by Britain’s Royal Niger Company came under official British control with the establishment of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate. This ushered in an era of “indirect rule,” in which local governments were empowered to enforce British laws—many of which, including those around water rates and taxes—were met with opposition by communities that lacked representation in the administration of their local governments. Moreover, the influence of Christianity, the English language, and other Western cultural paradigms eroded existing traditions held for centuries, all while imposing European-style political hierarchies on communities like the Igbo, which were largely decentralized up until that point. Colonial rule ended in 1960 when Britain granted Nigeria its independence as part of a broader decolonization effort and a deemphasis on imperialism in the wake of World War II.

Thematically, colonization is framed as a force of profound destabilization in Things Fall Apart, with Obierika giving voice to some of Achebe’s own views on the matter. Of the white colonizers, Obierika says, “He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart” (176). Yet Achebe also presents a nuanced view of colonization in that he avoids absolutism when depicting the tensions between tradition and modernity. In a 1972 interview with Nigerian scholar Ernest N. Emenyonu, Achebe said, “I never will take the stand that the Old must win or that the New must win. The point is that no single truth satisfied me—and this is well founded in the Igbo world view” (Emenyonu, Ernest N., and Charles E. Nnolim. “Achebe: Accountable to Our Society—An Interview.” Remembering a Legend: Chinua Achebe. African Heritage Press, 2014, p. 211).