Things Fall Apart (1958)
by Chinua Achebe with an Introduction by Chinua Achebe
Picador Edition, The African Trilogy, 1988, 558pp.
Also available in the Penguin Modern Classics range.
It has been fifty years since Chinua Achebe’s landmark novel, Things Fall Apart, was published and in that time its reputation and power has not been diminished. The sheer brutal power of Achebe’s simple stark prose launches you headlong into the fight for the very soul of a nation – its cultural identity, its political identity, and most crucially its religious identity. One knows from the first sentence that this is to be a novel that ends in bloodshed, and it is still shocking when we get there. The blood spilt on those African soils we know will echo through time. As the Yeats poem, The Second Coming, from which Achebe has taken his title, says:
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
The story goes that when Achebe sent his completed manuscript to William Heinemann, it was the first African novel he had seen and so was unsure of its merit. He passed it to his friend, recently back from a teaching post in Africa, Dr Donald Macrae, who wrote what must surely be the shortest recommendation ever: “The best first novel since the war.” It is not difficult to see where Macrae is coming from, for if this is not the best first novel since the war, it is certainly one of the best. Achebe has a distinct voice, and a subject matter that is wholly original within fiction published in the west until that point.
Things Fall Apart tells the story of the Obi tribe – located in what we presume to be the present day borders of Nigeria, though of course the Obi do not recognize this territorial boundary, just as they do not recognize the bicycle upon which the first missionary arrives, which they call his “Iron horse”.
Achebe builds up this portrait of the primitive Obi tribe in good, clear strokes. Their reasoning and behaviour is explained and their ritualistic habits not dismissed in a way a non-African might have portrayed it.
The first part of this novel introduces to an important man, Okonkwo, who attempts to better himself and his families lot, only to become disgraced through a tragic accident in which:
“Okonkwo’s gun had exploded and a piece of iron had pierced the boy’s heart.” (P.105)
As the taking of a fellow clansman’s life is a crime against the earth goddess, Okonkwo and his family have to leave Obi land, and can only return after seven years. They settle in a village called Mbanta, in his motherland, where he remains deeply shamed. Back in his home town of Mbaino, his house is burnt to the ground, and his animals killed. This is, we are told:
“merely a cleansing [of] the land which Okonkwo had polluted with he blood of a clansman.” (P.105)
This reasoning – along with the treating of Ogbanje (a changeling) – a child who repeatedly dies and returns to its mother to be reborn – who when they die are disfigured and buried rise again, with the facial disfigurement sometimes present – replay as events with the Christian missionaries that come to Obi to convert “the primitive tribes of the lower Niger.” (p.168)
When the first missionary is killed – a simple man who came only on his iron horse, spreading God’s word – he is reborn as a contingent of missionaries, more zealous than the first. The tribesmen grant the missionaries a plot of land upon which to build their church. The land is in the Evil Forest. The Evil Forest is where the Ogbanje are buried, and the tribesmen suspect the missionaries will die there. The land was given under the challenge:
“Let us give them a portion of the Evil Forest. They boast about their victory over death. Let us give them a real battlefield in which to show their victory.” (P.124)
When the missionaries do not die, but prosper in the Evil Forest,
“It became known that the white man’s fetish had unbelievable power.” (P.124)
The battle lines between Christianity and the tribal religion is drawn, and Okonkwo seeing his chance at reinstatement to power within his tribe, becomes one of the men who will stand against the white man, will expel the church from their land, for it is a type of Ogbanje, has committed a crime against the earth goddess and needs to be disfigured.
To reveal more of this novel would be to diminish its devastating power to a first time reader. Things Fall Apart is one of Africa’s greatest novels (along with Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy) and is a wonderful testament to Achebe’s power as a novelist.
When Things Fall Apart first appeared in 1958, one of its reviewers (whom Achebe seems to think is V. S. Pritchard) said that Achebe’s second novel might prove more difficult to write. Achebe followed Things Fall Apart with No Longer At Ease in 1960. The review of that book follows.
This is a book written by a know author and it has sensible meaning and well composed text i love chinua achebe.