THINGS FALL
APART
-Chinua Achebe
Published in 1958, Things Fall
Apart is one of the masterpieces of 20th century African fiction.
Things Fall
Apart is set in the 1890s, during the coming of the white man to Nigeria. In
part, the novel is a response and antidote to a large tradition of European
literature in which Africans are depicted as primitive and mindless savages.
The attitudes present in colonial literature are so ingrained into our
perception of Africa that the District Commissioner, who appears at the end of
the novel, strikes a chord of familiarity with most readers. He is arrogant,
dismissive of African "savages," and totally ignorant of the
complexity and richness of Igbo life. Yet his attitude echoes so much of the
depiction of Africa; this attitude, following Achebe's depiction of the Igbo,
seems hollow and savage.
Digression is one of Achebe's
most important tools. Although the novel's central story is the tragedy
of Okonkwo, Achebe takes any opportunity he can to digress and relate anecdotes
and tertiary incidents. The novel is part documentary, but the liveliness of
Achebe's narrative protects the book from reading like an anthropology text. We
are allowed to see the Igbo through their own eyes, as they celebrate the
various rituals and holidays that mark important moments in the year and in the
people's live.
Achebe depicts the Igbo as a
people with great social institutions. Their culture is rich and impressively
civilized, with traditions and laws that place great emphasis on justice and
fairness. The people are ruled not by a king or chief but by a kind of simple
democracy, in which all males gather and make decisions by consensus.
Ironically, it is the Europeans, who often boast of bringing democratic
institutions to the rest of the world, who try to suppress these clan meetings
in Umuofia. The Igbo also boast a high degree of social mobility. Men are not
judged by the wealth of their fathers, and Achebe emphasizes that high rank is
attainable for all freeborn Igbo.
He does not shy from
depicting the injustices of Igbo society. No more or less than Victorian
England of the same era, the Igbo are deeply patriarchal. They also have a
great fear of twins, who are abandoned immediately after birth to a death by
exposure. Violence is not unknown to them, although warfare on a European scale
is something of which they have no comprehension.
The novel attempts to repair
some of the damage done by earlier European depictions of Africans. But this
recuperation must necessarily come in the form of memory; by the time Achebe
was born, the coming of the white man had already destroyed many aspects of
indigenous culture.
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