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Chinua AchebeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
After the egwugwu burn down the mission, Okonkwo feels something “akin to happiness” (192). Okonkwo was one of the strongest and most respected voices in the decision to act, and that feeling of being a “warrior” makes him “almost happy again” (192). Yet the men of Umuofia are still on their guard, and when the District Commissioner, to whom Mr. Smith reports, sends for a convoy from Umuofia, Okonkwo and his fellow men travel armed.
Upon arrival, the men set their sheathed machetes and goatskin bags on the floor of the District Commissioner’s office and tell their story. The Commissioner sends for his men, who share the Ibo tongue but “are ignorant” of local customs, so that they can “take warning” (193). Suddenly, as the men of Umuofia tell the story, they are “handcuffed and led into the guardroom […] so quickly that the six men [do] not see it coming” (194).
The Commissioner tells the men that he “shall not do [them] any harm” if they will “agree to cooperate” and not “ill-treat others” (194). Though the Commissioner tells the messengers “to treat the men with respect because they [are] the leaders of Umuofia,” they order each prisoner’s head shaved and then mock them (195). The guard provides no food for two days and no water to drink. When a guard overhears Okonkwo discussing killing a white man, he delivers blows to his head and back, leaving Okonkwo “choked with hate” (195).
Meanwhile, messengers travel to Umuofia to announce the fine of 250 bags of cowries must be paid immediately to spare the village’s leaders from hanging. Despite the full moon, which would ordinarily draw children out to play, women out to dance, and young men to explore, the villagers stay at home. The village is “like a startled animal with ears erect, sniffing the silent, ominous air and not knowing which way to run” (196).
Into this silence, the crier beats his ogene and summons Umuofia’s men to the market in the morning. Okonkwo’s wives and daughters, including Ezinma, who had been away to visit her future husband’s family, are fearful. But the next morning, the men of the village quickly decide to pay the fine, 50 bags of which go (though the villagers do not know this) to the messengers, who artificially raised the fine.
When the Commissioner releases the prisoners, he speaks to them about the “great queen” whose rules he executes in Africa, but the men “[do] not listen” (198). As they leave, they do not speak to one another or to any of the guards.
As they return to the village via a busy footpath, they run into women and children who avoid them when they see the men’s “heavy and fearsome looks” (198). Men join the group quietly and march with the prisoners, breaking off into small groups at each compound; “the village [is] astir in a silent, suppressed way” (199). Ezinma greets Okonkwo with food, which he eats “absent-mindedly” to please her and the relatives, including Obierika, who encourage him to eat (199). As they sit in silence, watching him eat, the men notice the whip marks on his back.
The village crier again summons men that night, and Okonkwo sleeps little, occupying himself with thoughts of war. Not to choose war would be to choose cowardice; if they decide on that action, “he [will] go out and avenge himself” for the pains of prison (199). He recalls past wars and laments that “worthy men are no more” in Umuofia (200). He seems certain that one man, Egonwanne, will discourage the others from pursuing a “war of blame,” but he decides that, if the men are convinced by such an argument, he will show Egonwanne his injured body.
Okonkwo prepares for the meeting with Obierika, expressing his concerns about Egonwanne. But amid the busy, loud crowd, Okika, who was imprisoned with Okonkwo, speaks first. “A great man and an orator,” Okika nonetheless lacks a booming voice, and so Onyeka quiets the villagers before Okika begins. He says that the flood of concerned citizens shows that “something [is] after [their lives]” (203). Okika reminds the people that the gods and ancestors “weep,” and he points out that not “all the sons of Umuofia” remain: Many “have broken the clan and gone their several ways” (203).
Okika encourages the villagers, despite the chance that they will have to injure brothers and kinsmen who have changed sides. “We must root out this evil,” he reminds them, while it is still possible (204). But at this moment, five court messengers approach around the bend of the road, and Okonkwo immediately rises to face them.
The white man, “whose power [Okonkwo knows] too well,” sends an order to stop the meeting (204). Okonkwo draws his machete and decapitates the messenger. The villagers descend into “tumult,” allowing the other messengers to escape, and Okonkwo, knowing “that Umuofia would not go to war,” goes away (205).
The District Commissioner quickly grows angry when he comes looking for, but cannot find, Okonkwo. Obierika offers to take the Commissioner to Okonkwo, adding the caveat that “perhaps your men will help us” (206).
They lead the Commissioner through Okonkwo’s compound and into the bush to Okonkwo’s dead body, which dangles from a tree (207). Obierika asks if the Commissioner’s men will take Okonkwo down, for it is “against [their] custom” to take down a man who commits suicide, a decision considered an “abomination,” and “an offense against the earth” (207). They need strangers to bury Okonkwo, and then they will “make sacrifices to cleanse the desecrated land” (208).
Suddenly, Obierika turns to the District Commissioner in anger and tells him: “You drove him to kill himself; and now he will be buried like a dog” (208). In response, the Commissioner orders the body taken down and all the men who led him there brought to court.
The novel ends with an entry from the Commissioner, as he leaves, relying on his messengers to cut Okonkwo down, for the Commissioner “must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from the tree” (208). This story will become a chapter, or maybe a paragraph, in the book he will publish about his adventures “[toiling] to bring civilization to different parts of Africa” (208). The Commissioner’s book is to be titled “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger” (209).
The conclusion of Achebe’s novel arrives through a trail of mistranslations. Ultimately, the District Commissioner’s perspective on events wins, rounding out the novel’s ominous ending with a gesture to the “reasonable paragraph” that Okonkwo’s story will take up in his colonialist narrative (209). But the Commissioner literally misses the words that are translated for him by foreign Ibo people unfamiliar with local customs; he hears “superfluous words” when the leaders of the tribe try to communicate with him (206).
Okonkwo dies of suicide because his kinsmen “[will] not go to war” against the white men who demand power (205). When the messenger uses the authority of “the white man whose power you know too well” to induce him to end the meeting, Okonkwo responds not with words—which white men mistranslate and dismiss—but with a decisive and brutal action (204). His death is similarly solitary; importantly, the narrator does not enter Okonkwo’s interiority before he kills the messenger or before he kills himself. Okonkwo’s death belongs to him, not to the listener or reader. This is also part of Defining Manhood Through Violence. To Okonkwo, these acts do not require explanation: The reason is self-evident.
The discussion of mysterious, spiritual worlds throughout the text throws Okonkwo’s dangling body, the final image of the story, into relief. Indeed, the focus of the final chapters is not the spiritual world of gods and ancestors but the community on earth: the fathers and brothers Okika speaks of in Chapter 24. The decision to pay for the village elders’ return is urgent enough that gods cannot be consulted, and the decision to go to war is one for men. As Okonkwo thinks about the new village order, he laments the days “when men were men” (200).
Gender remains central to Okonkwo’s anger and thirst for vengeance. The men scoff at the “peace and good government” ordered by a “great queen” far away in England (198). Distant, feminine power repeatedly sneaks up on the village: the “brief scuffle” that does not even allow the men to fight their imprisonment and the sudden arrival of the messengers around the bend in Chapter 24 contrast with the violent and masculine war that Okonkwo recalls (194). When Ezinma asks Obierika “what the men of Umuofia were going to do” about her father’s imprisonment, she shows the insistence that makes her father wish she were a boy (197). She also shows that masculine qualities are not for men alone.
Rather than a generational, regenerating story of The Bond Between Fathers and Sons, the story of Things Fall Apart becomes a story of abrupt silencing, as the District Commissioner has the last word in the story. With Nwoye disappeared and Ezinma left to fight for her father’s dignity, the social structures truly have “fallen apart.” Harvests, traditions, and even the rituals of marriage (which Ezinma undergoes quietly in the background of this final conflict) fade. When the village responds to Okonkwo’s murderous act with “tumult instead of action,” their fleeing bodies’ chaos depicts the village’s eroded structure (204). Okonkwo’s dead body, then, symbolizes his family’s final, shameful death at the hand of the white man.
By Chinua Achebe