Things Fall Apart

Ikemefuna arrives in the village of Umuofia in the first part of Chapter 2. One quiet night, a town crier’s ogene drum signals to the men of the village to gather in the town the next morning. As he hears the signal fade, Okonkwo wonders what the emergency could be. Because he is “a man of action,” he understands that he may be called upon to fight when the morning comes (10).

In the morning, about 10,000 men gather to listen to Ogbuefi Ezeugo, who explains that “the sons of wild animals have dared to murder a daughter of Umuofia” (11). Ogbuefi Udo’s wife was killed when traveling to Mbaino.

Okonkwo is selected as Umuofia’s village representative. Everyone is afraid of Umuofia because of its shrine, where a magic Oracle resides, so Okonkwo knows that the village of Mbaino “would not go to war against [Umuofia] without first trying a peace settlement” (12). They agree to send a young man, Ikemefuna, whom the elders place in Okonkwo’s household, and a young virgin woman who “replaces” Ogbuefi Udo’s wife (12).

Ikemefuna enters a house that Okonkwo rules with a “fiery temper” (13). Because of his hatred for “gentleness” and “idleness,” his father’s dominant characteristics, Okonkwo drives his children to work hard with him in the fields, and he accumulates considerable wealth as a result (13). When Ikemefuna arrives, Okonkwo forces his senior wife, the mother of his eldest son, Nwoye, to welcome the frightened boy to their home.

At the end of the chapter, the narrator reveals that neither Ikemefuna nor Okonkwo knows that Ikemefuna’s father had participated in killing Ogbuefi Udo’s wife.

Chapter 3 tells of Unoka’s visit to Agbala, the Umuofia Oracle, and the priestess at its shrine, Chika. Against the sacred fire, the priestess cuts an ominous figure. After Unoka begins to explain his work in the fields, Chika interrupts him with a terrible scream.

Chika explains that everyone knows how little he works and challenges him to “go home and work like a man” (18). But the narrator recognizes that “Unoka was an ill-fated man,” as proven by the swelling illness that killed him; a man “afflicted with swelling in the stomach and the limbs” could not die in the house to “be buried in [the earth’s] bowels” (18). Despite and because of this curse, Okonkwo devotes himself to avoiding “his father’s contemptible life and shameful death” (18).

As a young man, Okonkwo establishes his own farm. He appeals to Nwakibie, a respected and wealthy man in the village, to give him yam seeds so he can cultivate his farm. Nwakibie is generous with him, though he usually refuses young men; he says that he “can trust” Okonkwo because “you can tell a ripe corn by its look” (22). Okonkwo chooses to grow yams because they are “a man’s crop” (23), and though he must sharecrop, a process by which he will retain only one-third of the harvest, “there [is] no other way” for “a young man whose father [has] no yams” (22).

Okonkwo plants his yams early, as a responsible farmer would, but the village suffers an enormous drought that damages his plants. The farmers who waited to plant are “the wise ones” that year, and their yams survive (23). When Okonkwo plants his remaining yams, a flood comes, and the second crop also fails. His father encourages him, reminding him that he has “a manly and a proud heart” (23), and though Unoka’s “love of talk […] [tries] Okonkwo’s patience beyond words,” he remembers this encouragement and his persistence through the first year of farming in his later years (25).