Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Okonkwo is a strong man in a strong village. Then the missionaries arrive. Achebe wrote it as an answer to Western novels about Africa. Whether it answers them or complicates them further is part of the novel's power.

About the work

Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart in 1958, two years before Nigeria gained independence from British colonial rule. It is the most widely read novel in African literature and one of the most widely read novels in English of the twentieth century. The novel tells the story of Okonkwo, a warrior and leader in the Igbo village of Umuofia, who achieves prominence through strength and determination after growing up in the shadow of his father, Unoka, who was considered weak and unsuccessful. The first two-thirds of the novel depict Igbo life in detail before the arrival of Europeans. The final section describes the arrival of Christian missionaries and British colonial administrators and the progressive dismantling of Igbo society.

Achebe wrote the novel partly in response to Western representations of Africa, and specifically in response to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which he had criticized in a 1975 lecture as a profoundly racist text that denied humanity and complexity to African people. Achebe argued that Conrad and other Western writers had portrayed Africa as a primitive, pre-logical void against which European civilization defined itself. Things Fall Apart was intended as a corrective: a novel that would show pre-colonial Igbo society as complex, structured, morally serious, and fully human.

The novel's title is taken from W.B. Yeats's poem "The Second Coming": "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." The epigraph establishes a tone of civilizational collapse, but it also raises a question that the novel never fully resolves: whether the Igbo world is falling apart because of external invasion, because of internal contradictions, or because of the interaction between the two.

A sequel, No Longer at Ease (1960), follows Okonkwo's grandson Obi in post-independence Nigeria. A second sequel, Arrow of God (1964), returns to the colonial period. Together, the three novels form what is sometimes called the African Trilogy.

Things to notice

Igbo society rendered in complexity. The first section of the novel is devoted to depicting Igbo life before the arrival of Europeans: agricultural practices, religious rituals, legal proceedings, kinship structures, storytelling traditions, and social hierarchies. Achebe does not present this society as utopian. It practices the killing of twins. It excludes certain groups designated as osu, or outcasts. It has rigid gender expectations. It resolves some disputes through violence. The point is not that Igbo society was perfect but that it was a functioning, complex civilization with its own internal logic and its own mechanisms for change. This is a direct response to the Western literary tradition that had portrayed pre-colonial Africa as blank, primitive, or savage.

Okonkwo's tragic structure. Okonkwo is structured as a tragic protagonist in something close to the classical sense: a great man brought down by a fatal flaw. His flaw is his desperate fear of appearing weak, which he associates with his father. This fear drives him to work obsessively, to dominate his family, to kill his adopted son Ikemefuna rather than appear soft, and to respond to the colonial incursion with violence when a more measured response might have been possible. The novel invites the reader to admire Okonkwo's strength and to recognize its destructiveness simultaneously. Whether Okonkwo is a hero or a tyrant, or whether he is both, is left for the reader to determine.

The killing of Ikemefuna. In one of the novel's most disturbing scenes, Okonkwo participates in the ritual killing of Ikemefuna, a boy who has lived with Okonkwo's family for three years and who calls Okonkwo "father." Okonkwo has been advised by an elder not to participate, because the boy calls him father. He participates anyway, striking the killing blow himself, because "he was afraid of being thought weak." The scene is crucial because it prevents the reader from romanticizing pre-colonial Igbo society or from treating Okonkwo as an uncomplicated hero. The society's own moral framework condemns what Okonkwo does; he acts against that framework out of personal pathology.

The arrival of the missionaries and the split in the community. The missionaries arrive and begin to convert members of the community. The first converts are the marginalized: the osu, or outcasts, who have never been fully accepted by Igbo society, and those who question aspects of traditional practice. Achebe presents this dynamic with considerable nuance. The missionaries offer something real to people who have been excluded. At the same time, the conversion process begins the disintegration of the social fabric. Nwoye, Okonkwo's son, converts to Christianity, and his conversion is presented as a response to the moral questions raised by the killing of Ikemefuna. The novel does not endorse Nwoye's choice or condemn it; it shows the forces that produce it.

The District Commissioner's paragraph. The novel's ending is one of its most devastating structural moves. After Okonkwo's death -- he hangs himself, an abomination in Igbo culture -- the perspective shifts to the District Commissioner, a British colonial official. The Commissioner reflects that Okonkwo's story might make an interesting paragraph in the book he is planning to write, to be called The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. An entire life -- a complex, flawed, passionate, tragic human life -- is reduced to a paragraph in a colonial administrator's memoir. The novel the reader has just finished reading is the story that the Commissioner's paragraph will erase. This is Achebe's most direct intervention in the Western literary tradition: he writes the full story that colonial literature reduced to a footnote.

Language and proverbs. Achebe writes in English but incorporates Igbo words, proverbs, and speech patterns throughout the novel. The proverbs are not decorative; they encode a worldview and a mode of reasoning that is specific to Igbo culture. Achebe's use of English has itself been a subject of debate. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the Kenyan novelist, argued that African writers should write in African languages, not in the language of the colonizer. Achebe disagreed, arguing that English had become an African language and that the task was to use it in ways that carried African experience. The novel itself is an argument for this position.

Gender. The novel's treatment of gender is complex and unsettling. Okonkwo's masculinity is presented as extreme and destructive, but the society that produces him also has strong gender divisions. Women have specific roles and powers -- the priestess Chielo, for example, wields considerable spiritual authority -- but they are also subject to domestic violence and exclusion from major decision-making. The novel does not resolve these tensions; it presents them as part of the social fabric.

Questions to ask

Is Okonkwo a hero? Is he a villain? Can he be both? What does the novel gain by refusing to make him simply one or the other?
The novel presents pre-colonial Igbo society as complex but not as perfect. Why is this distinction important? What would be lost if Achebe had portrayed Igbo society as utopian?
What is the reader meant to make of Nwoye's conversion to Christianity? Is it a betrayal of his culture, a legitimate response to its failures, or something more complicated?
How does the novel treat the relationship between individual character and historical forces? Is Okonkwo's downfall caused by his personal flaws, by the colonial invasion, or by the interaction between the two?
The District Commissioner's final reduction of Okonkwo's story to a paragraph is clearly meant to be devastating. But does the novel itself risk reducing the complexity of the colonial encounter in other ways? Are the British characters in the novel given the same complexity as the Igbo characters?
Achebe wrote the novel in English. Does this choice undermine the novel's project of asserting Igbo cultural autonomy, or does it demonstrate the capacity of English to carry experiences and perspectives that were previously excluded from it?

What critics have argued

Achebe on Conrad. Achebe's 1975 lecture "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" is one of the most influential pieces of literary criticism of the twentieth century. Achebe argued that Heart of Darkness presents Africa as a metaphysical darkness against which European self-examination takes place, and that this presentation denies full humanity to African people. The lecture provoked intense debate. Some critics agreed with Achebe; others argued that he had misread Conrad or that the racism was a function of the narrator, not the author. The debate continues, and it has shaped the way both novels are read and taught.

Postcolonial criticism. Things Fall Apart has been a central text in postcolonial literary studies since the field's emergence in the 1980s. Critics such as Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Edward Said have drawn on the novel to explore questions of cultural hybridity, colonial discourse, and the politics of representation. Bhabha's concept of the "third space" -- a space of cultural negotiation that is neither wholly colonizer nor wholly colonized -- has been applied to characters like Nwoye and to the novel's own linguistic hybridity.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, in In My Father's House (1992), argued that Achebe's novel is not simply a rejection of the Western novelistic tradition but a transformation of it. Appiah noted that the novel uses realist narrative techniques derived from the Western tradition while also incorporating oral storytelling modes that disrupt those techniques. The result is a work that cannot be fully accounted for by either Western or African critical frameworks alone.

Emmanuel Obiechina, in Language and Theme in the African Novel (1990), examined the novel's use of proverbs and Igbo rhetorical forms, arguing that the proverbs are not merely local color but constitute a distinct mode of thought that shapes the novel's structure and meaning.

Feminist readings. Critics including Florence Stratton and Susan VanZanten Gallagher have examined the novel's treatment of gender, noting that while the novel criticizes Okonkwo's extreme masculinity, it does not fundamentally challenge the patriarchal structure of Igbo society. The female characters, with the exception of Chielo, have relatively little agency. Some feminist critics have argued that the novel's critique of colonialism does not extend to a critique of patriarchy.

Reception in Africa vs. the West. The novel's reception has differed significantly in African and Western contexts. In the West, the novel has often been read as an accessible introduction to African experience, a role that some African critics have found reductive. In Nigeria and other African countries, the novel has been read more specifically as a treatment of Igbo history and culture, and it has been the subject of debates about the relationship between literature and ethnic identity. Some Igbo readers have praised the novel's authenticity; others have questioned whether any single novel can represent the complexity of Igbo society.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o's critique of language. Ngugi, in Decolonising the Mind (1986), argued that writing in English inherently limits the decolonizing potential of African literature, because English carries with it the conceptual categories and assumptions of the colonizer. Ngugi's critique applies to Achebe's work, though Ngugi expressed respect for Achebe as a writer. Achebe responded that the question was not which language to use but how to use it, and that English could be made to carry African experience in ways that transformed both the language and the experience.

About the work

Things to notice

Questions to ask

What critics have argued

Further reading