Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) -- criticism

from Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000 Brian W. Shaffer

Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart (1958)



I would be quite satisfied if my novels . . . did no more than teach my readers
that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery
from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.

Chinua Achebe, “The novelist as teacher”1


I

Things Fall Apart, by Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, is easily the most
famous and widely read African novel in English. Translated into fifty different
languages, with more than 8 million copies in print worldwide, this celebrated
author’s first novel is often compared to Greek tragedy for its straightforward,
searing power, acute family dynamics, and potent sense of inevitability. Deemed
“perhaps the most memorable account in English of an African culture and
the impact upon it of white European encroachment,”2 Things Fall Apart
explores the traumatizing effects of British colonialism on a small Nigerian
village at the turn of the nineteenth century. However, Achebe resists the
temptation to portray his tribal past in romantic or sentimental terms;3 rather,
he adopts a “realistic” approach in the hope of countering the stereotypical
representations of indigenous Nigerians and other Africans made familiar to
western – and indeed to many African – readers in such works as Joyce Cary’s
Mr Johnson (1939). Cary was a colonial officer who served in Nigeria between
1910 and 1920. His once popular novel depicted traditional tribal society in
patronizing and sentimental terms and served as an “ideological justification
of the [colonial] status quo.”4 In addition to countering the view of African
tribal life portrayed in Cary’s novel, in Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness

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(1899),5 and in other works of literature familiar to British audiences, Things
Fall Apart played a major role in African self-understanding; it became “the
first novel by an African writer to be included in the required syllabus for
African secondary schools, not only in Nigeria but (excluding South Africa)
throughout the English-speaking parts of the African continent.”6 Published
two years before Nigeria declared independence from Great Britain (Nigeria
was under British control from 1906 until 1960), Achebe’s first novel also
explores what might be called the “politics of point of view” and the problem
of alterity or “otherness”: the difficulty, if not impossibility, “of completely
imagining one individual or culture in terms of another.”7

II

Many western readers of Things Fall Apart will have difficulty approaching the
work given their dearth of knowledge about African history in general and the
history of southeastern Nigeria, the setting of Achebe’s novel, in particular.
While a detailed treatment of this history is outside the scope of this study, a
few relevant facts of historical context for the novel are essential. Things Fall
Apart is set at the beginning of the twentieth century, soon after the European
“scramble for Africa,” when “British authorities, missions, and trade penetrated
the Igbo hinterland east of the Niger river”8 and traditional Igbo society began
to undergo the cultural disintegration that followed colonialism. Nigeria, which
“never had any integrity save one imposed by the colonial powers,” was in
fact an agglomeration of “hundreds of different ethnic and linguistic communities.”
9 Achebe came from the third most populous of these Nigerian
communities, the Igbo, who reside in the southeastern part of the country.
Yet the Igbo themselves were not entirely homogeneous: Igbo villages only a
few miles apart spoke languages, all of which were called “Igbo,” that differed
significantly from each other. Indeed, “the dialects, cultures, and political
systems” of the various Igbo villages varied widely.10 Despite these differences,
according to Achebe in his recent memoir Home and Exile, the “more than
ten million strong” Igbo people, one “of the major peoples of Africa,” felt a
strong sense of solidarity and national belonging:


The Igbo nation in precolonial times was not quite like any nation people are
familiar with. It did not have the apparatus of centralized government but was
a conglomeration of hundreds of independent towns and villages . . . which were
in reality ministates that cherished their individual identity but also . . . perceived
themselves as Igbo . . .11


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This sense of nationhood and cultural integrity led the Igbo, for all of their
differences, to attempt, between 1967 and 1970, to secede from the artificial,
colonial construction Nigeria in order to form their own nation, to be called
The Republic of Biafra. This revolt was decisively crushed in 1970, and the
“Biafran experience served as a warning for the rest of Africa not to try to
undo the map-making of the colonial powers.”12

Chinua Achebe was born in 1930 in Ogidi, an Igbo-speaking community
in eastern Nigeria that was a center of Anglican missionary work. The son of
a Christian convert who began proselytizing for the Anglican church in 1904,
Achebe was baptized Albert Chinualumogu and only dropped “the tribute to
Victorian England” (Victoria’s consort was named Albert) when he enrolled
at university.13 Achebe received his formal education in English, first in church
schools and then at University College, Ibadan (then affiliated with the University
of London), where he graduated, in 1953, with a degree in English
literature. At about this time, Achebe recalls, the “nationalist movement in
British West Africa” sparked a “mental revolution”: “It suddenly seemed that
we too might have a story to tell. ‘Rule Britannia!’ to which we had marched
so unselfconsciously on Empire Day now stuck in our throat.”14

Achebe, who has received his nation’s highest award for intellectual achievement,
the Nigerian National Merit Award, is often mentioned as a leading
candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature and holds honorary doctorates
from more than twenty universities in Canada, England, Nigeria, Scotland,
and the United States. He is best known as the author of five novels – Things
Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of
the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987) – of which the first four
form a loose tetralogy “covering the history of Nigeria from colonization until
the first military coup.”15 He is also a respected essayist, advocate of African
letters, and editor. In addition to editing important African literary journals,
Achebe was the founding editor of the Heinemann Books African Writers
Series, the first series to bring English language African writing to a wider
audience. Since 1990 he has been the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of
Languages and Literature at Bard College, in New York state.

Achebe, who is “perfectly bilingual,” having grown up at what he calls
a “crossroads of cultures,”16 has been criticized by some for writing novels in
English rather than in his indigenous Igbo tongue. Abdul R. JanMohamed
poses this contentious issue as a question: “[C]an African experience be
adequately represented through the alien media . . . of the colonizer’s language
and literary forms or will these media inevitably alter the nature of African
experience in significant ways?”17 In other words, should English be excluded
“as a language of African fiction on purely ideological grounds”?18 To be sure,
as JanMohamed explains,

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The African writer’s very decision to use English as his medium is engulfed
by ironies, paradoxes, and contradictions. He writes in English because he was
born in a British colony and can receive formal education only in English. More
significantly, however, he is compelled to master and use English because of the
prevailing ideological pressures within the colonial system . . .19


Another critic puts the problem even more baldly: “Achebe uses the written
word brought by the colonizers in order to record and recreate the oral world
obliterated or denied by them.”20 Some have questioned Achebe’s commitment
to African literary traditions in view of his choice of literary genre,
the novel, in which to work. Since the novel is originally a European genre,
this argument runs, no novel, not even an African one, can avoid exhibiting a
“Eurocentric” worldview.21

Achebe’s defense of his linguistic and artistic choices is surprisingly practical,
his goal being to reach as wide an audience as possible, both inside and outside
Nigeria. In an essay Achebe articulates the problem and explains his reasoning:


Does my writing in the language of my colonizer not amount to acquiescing
in the ultimate dispossession? . . . Let me simply say that when at the age of
thirteen I went to [a] school modeled after British public schools, it was not
only English literature that I encountered there. I came in contact also for the
first time in my life with a large number of other boys of my own age who did
not speak my Igbo language. And they were not foreigners but fellow Nigerian
youth . . . [W]e had to put away our different mother tongues and communicate
in the language of the colonizers . . . We chose English not because
the British desired it but because having tacitly accepted the new nationalities
into which colonialism had grouped us, we needed its language to transact
our business, including the business of overthrowing colonialism itself in the
fullness of time. Now, that does not mean that our indigenous languages should
now be neglected. It does mean that these languages must co-exist and interact
with the newcomer . . . For me it is not either English or Igbo, it is both.22


As one critic puts this problem, of the approximately 1,000 different languages
and dialects to be found in Africa, “250 of them are to be found in Nigeria,
and Nigerian writers quickly realized that if they wished to communicate not
only with the English-speaking world at large, but also with considerable
numbers of their fellow-countrymen,” they would have to do so in English.23
Achebe elsewhere adds “that the story we [Africans] had to tell could not be
told for us by anyone else, no matter how gifted or well intentioned.”24 Not to
write in English, then, would leave the definition and representation of Achebe’s
society to the discretion of colonial, and possibly even racist, literary authors.

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The charge that Achebe’s use of European novelistic forms compromises
the Igbo integrity of his literary art is also easily countered, for Things Fall
Apart, which in places reads like a folktale, is in fact a hybrid form, one which
takes into account both European novelistic conventions and African oral
forms. In any case, as Mikhail Bakhtin, the twentieth century’s foremost
theorist of the novel, reminds us, the novel, rather than being a univocal or
monological entity, is necessarily polyphonic, the repository of the “diverse
and dialogically opposed social voices of an era.”25 As one critic, following
Bakhtin, observes, “African writers who use English are aware that their
language is already populated with the political, social, and literary intentions
of their colonial teachers, but they compel it ‘to serve [their] own new intentions,
to serve a second master’.”26 Indeed, Achebe sees himself as “extending
the frontiers of English” so as to accommodate African literary modes.27 The
result is Achebe’s successful adaptation of “a western literary genre into
something that [is] authentically African in content, mode and pattern”.28 It is
surely for this reason that Achebe can bridge the gap, as few authors have,
between western and African readers and literary forms.29

Achebe has characterized Things Fall Apart as “an act of atonement with
my past, the ritual return and homage of a prodigal son.”30 The novel is far
more than this, however. For in addition to seeking to recover and celebrate
the author’s receding Igbo past, the work mounts a provocative challenge to
western modes of understanding and to the British imperial account of African
history. At the same time, it interrogates certain dimensions of patriarchal
Igbo culture that are revealed to be compromised by their own biases and
burdened by their own contradictions. Achebe’s “nostalgia,” ultimately, is
anything but simple, straightforward, or smugly self-congratulatory.

III

Things Fall Apart treats the rise and fall of an Igbo man, Okonkwo; indeed,
this three-part novel is structured around the three distinct phases of the
protagonist’s life, with the middle phase detailing his years of exile from
Umuofia, his native village. Superficially, the novel follows the tradition of the
European Bildungsroman, or novel of education, in which the novelist traces
the protagonist’s (usually) triumphal development against the backdrop of
antagonistic social and familial forces.31 The arc of Okonkwo’s life conforms
as well to Aristotle’s conception of the tragic hero, “tragic flaw” and all.32 Yet
Things Fall Apart also concerns the triumphs and tragic demise of Okonkwo’s
Igbo (or “Ibo,” as it is designated in the novel) village, Umuofia; Okonkwo’s

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community, like the protagonist himself, is assaulted, and ultimately undone,
by British colonial and modernizing influences. In this sense Achebe’s
colonial novel shares a goal of postcolonial criticism generally: to draw “attention
to questions of identity in relation to broader national histories and
destinies.”33

“Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond,”
the novel begins; “His fame rested on solid personal achievements.”34 Respected
for his physical and military prowess and feared for his “very severe
look” (3–4),


Okonkwo was clearly cut out for great things. He was still young but he had
won fame as the greatest wrestler in the nine villages. He was a wealthy farmer
and had two barns full of yams, and had just married his third wife. To crown
it all he had taken titles and had shown incredible prowess in two inter-tribal
wars. (8)


Moreover, Okonkwo, “[A] man of action, a man of war,” is “the first to bring
home a human head” in “Umuofia’s latest war” (10).

As the above passage suggests, male success in Umuofia is measured in
martial ability and farming prowess – expressed in the number of titles, wives,
and barns of yams one possesses – and not in cowries (a form a currency), or
in family status alone. The novel repeatedly emphasizes the Igbo’s meritocratic,
rather than hereditary, social system; in Umuofia “a man was judged according
to his worth and not according to the worth of his father” (8). This is
fortunate for Okonkwo, who inherits nothing from his profligate and title-
less father (8) and who achieves financial success only because of his tireless
efforts as a share-cropper for another farmer. “With a father like Unoka,
Okonkwo did not have the start in life which many young men had,” we
learn; “He neither inherited a barn nor a title, nor even a young wife” (18).
Indeed,


Anyone who knew [Okonkwo’s] grim struggle against poverty and misfortune
could not say he had been lucky. If ever a man deserved his success, that man
was Okonkwo. At an early age he had achieved fame as the greatest wrestler
in all the land. That was not luck. At the most one could say that his chi or
personal god was good. But the Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says
yes his chi says yes also. Okonkwo said yes very strongly; so his chi agreed. (27)35


Clearly, one dimension of Okonkwo’s “heroism” is his ability to better his lot
against all odds.

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Things Fall Apart brings profound psychological depth, replete with
Oedipal undertones, to the exploration of Okonkwo’s personality formation.
Above all, Okonkwo seeks to choose a path that deviates as much as possible
from his father’s “contemptible life and shameful death” (18). By Okonkwo’s
standards, and indeed by the traditional standards of the tribe, Unoka, his
father, is an embarrassing “failure” (5): a “lazy and improvident” debtor
who cannot properly feed his wife and children, a “loafer” who becomes a
village laughing-stock, a “coward” who cannot “bear the sight of blood” (5,
6). Unoka is even called “agbala” – a title-less man but also a woman – by one
of Oknonkwo’s childhood friends, which highlights the patriarchal nature
of Igbo society, in which demonstrated “manliness” was privileged (66).
Okonkwo’s determination to define himself against his father is noted repeatedly
in the novel: Okonkwo’s “whole life was dominated by fear, the fear
of failure and weakness,” a fear that “he should be found to resemble his father.”
Thus, Okonkwo is “ruled by one passion: to hate everything his father Unoka
had loved” (13). Indeed, “Whenever the thought of his father’s weakness and
failure troubled him he expelled it by thinking about his own strength and
success” (66).

Paradoxically, as successful as Okonkwo soon becomes, the seeds of his
tragic fall are sown in the very making of his triumph. Okonkwo is best
understood as a male version of an Antigone figure who, however nobly he
stands up for traditional values, destroys himself – literally, in his case, by
suicide – owing to his inflexibility and lack of compromise. In particular, the
rigidity of Okonkwo’s “masculine, martial values” is frequently noted in the
novel. As Abdul R. JanMohamed puts it, however much the novel lauds
his “pride, courage, and diligence,” Okonkwo ultimately comes across as an
“inflexible, calcified monomaniac.”36 Okonkwo’s alarming inflexibility is first
hinted at on the novel’s second page, where we learn of Okonkwo’s “slight
stammer” and his propensity to “use his fists” whenever “he was angry and
could not get his words out quickly enough” (4). “Okonkwo never showed
any emotion openly, unless it be the emotion of anger,” we learn shortly
afterwards; “To show affection was a sign of weakness [and] the only thing
worth demonstrating was strength” (28). Okonkwo possesses an “inflexible
will” (24) and a “heavy hand” with his kin, yet his repressive behavior is not
limited to family members – to the vicious beating of his wives or the cruel
intimidation of his children – but extends to the “less successful” men of the
tribe as well: “Okonkwo knew how to kill a man’s spirit” (26). Thus, although
Things Fall Apart celebrates Okonkwo’s traditionalism and resistance to
British colonialism – his commitment to doing things in “the grand, old way”

(166) – the novel also questions his obsession with “masculine” values and his
lack of tolerance and flexibility generally.37
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The incident that most decisively reveals Okonkwo’s tragic flaw is that
involving Ikemefuna, a boy from the neighboring community of Mbaino whose
father kills a “daughter of Umuofia” when she is visiting Mbaino’s market
(11). Umuofia being much feared, Mbaino accepts Umuofia’s ultimatum to
hand over a young man, Ikemefuna, and a virgin girl as compensation for the
wrongful death. Ikemefuna, needing a place to reside in Umuofia, is taken in
by Okonkwo and soon becomes an accepted member of Okonkwo’s household.
Okonkwo comes to treat him like a son and Ikemefuna, appropriately,
takes to calling Okonkwo “father” (28, 57). A few years later the “Oracle of
the Hills and Caves” decrees that Ikemefuna must be sacrificed by the elder
males of Umuofia. Okonkwo, however, is advised not to have a “hand” in the
death of anyone who calls him “father” (57). The tribesmen take Ikemefuna
out of the village to kill him. The first blow that is delivered fails to do the job,
however; and as the wounded boy runs toward Okonkwo for help, a “dazed”
Okonkwo, who “was afraid of being thought weak,” draws out his machete
and cuts the boy down (61). As Jeffrey Meyers puts it of this revealing episode,
“Though Ikemefuna’s cry, ‘My father, they have killed me!,’ recalls the last
words of the crucified Christ, the sacrifice is a re-enactment of the trial of
Abraham and Isaac . . . but without the intervention of a harsh but just God.”38
In Achebe’s novel, by contrast, Abraham follows through with the slaying of
Isaac. Okonkwo’s feelings of guilt for this act of infanticide – after all, he has
killed an adopted son with his own hands – leads him to drink heavily yet at
the same time to rebuke himself for becoming “a shivering old woman” (65)
for feeling such guilt at all. Okonkwo yet again equates compassion with
females and the lack of emotion with males. To the extent that Ikemefuna is,
as one critic argues, an “ideal type” for the clan given his successful balancing
of “masculine and feminine attributes,” Okonkwo’s murder of him


is not only a tragic destruction of a promising and guiltless individual [but]
connotes the murder of the clan’s potential; Ikemefuna’s sacrifice is both a
symbol of what the clan lacks and a realistic dramatisation of the clan’s inability
to maintain a harmonious balance between male and female principles . . .39


That is to say, the killing of Ikemefuna can be read in gendered terms as
embodying a critique of Okonkwo and his tribe.

As critical as the novel is of Okonkwo’s complicity in the killing of
Ikemefuna, however, Okonkwo is only punished by Umuofia when he
accidentally kills the 16-year-old son of a titled man of the village during his
father’s funeral (124). Okonkwo’s punishment is twofold: all of his property
is destroyed by the tribe, in order to cleanse “the land which Okonkwo had

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polluted with the blood of a clansman” (125), and he is temporarily exiled
from Umuofia to his mother’s kinsmen in Mbanta. Okonkwo’s goal of
becoming “one of the lords of the clan” (131) and of remaining among “the
nine masked spirits who administered justice in the clan” (171) is irreparably
compromised by his being “condemned for seven years to live in a strange
land” (133).

It is the “death” of a third son, however, his own, Nwoye, with whom
he has strained relations, that most devastates Okonkwo. Nwoye’s death is
not literal but figurative: it involves his conversion to Anglicanism, the “new
religion” that has gained ground in Umuofia during Okonkwo’s seven-year
exile (171). Indeed, “The clan had undergone such profound change during
[Okonkwo’s] exile that it was barely recognizable” (182): a church has been
built, a handful of converts won, one of whom is Nwoye, and a number
of evangelists now operate in the “surrounding towns and villages” (143). As
Okonkwo sees it, “To abandon the gods of one’s father [as Nwoye has done]
and go about with a lot of effeminate men clucking like old hens was the very
depth of abomination” (153). Okonkwo comes to view Nwoye as “degenerate
and effeminate,” and wonders, “How could he have begotten such a woman
for a son?” (153) Okonkwo’s greatest fear is here revealed: that his son, in
addition to his now-deceased father, has become a “woman,” and that these
two tragedies reflect negatively on him – both in his own eyes and in the eyes
of his fellow clansmen.

Okonkwo’s eventual suicide, a figuration of the entire tribe’s demise, stems
in part from his conviction that he has no true heirs. It is also a result of his
inability to adapt to changing circumstances: Okonkwo would rather end
his life than deal with the British. Like other Achebe heroes, Okonkwo fails
because his character becomes “ossified around certain traditional values.”40
Yet, as one critic observes, Oknokwo’s suicide is not altogether explicable.
Rather, it is best viewed as “ambiguous”: a recognition of his own failure and
a condemnation of his people and of the colonizers. In any case, Okonkwo’s
suicide “ironically brings on himself a shameful death like his father’s, a fate
he expended tremendous energy all his life to avoid.”41

Raymond Williams is correct to note that Okonkwo “is destroyed in a very
complicated process of internal contradictions and external invasion.”42 The
protagonist’s “internal contradictions” having been considered, it remains to
explore the “external invasion” of British colonizers in Nigeria that Okonkwo
relentlessly yet unsuccessfully battles. In another context Achebe observes
that, “In the last four hundred years, Africa has been menaced by Europe.” He
then breaks these four centuries into three important periods: the slave trade,
colonization, and decolonization.43 Obviously, Things Fall Apart centers on
the second of these three phases; references to the first – “stories about white

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men” who “took slaves away across the seas”(140–1) – are few and fleeting
here. And the third phase is taken up in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, a novel
about Obi, the son of Nwoye and grandson of Okonwko.44

Things Fall Apart interrogates what Achebe elsewhere calls the “psychology
of religious imperialism”:45 the mentality that seeks to justify the replacing
of the Igbo’s “false gods, gods of wood and stone,” with “this new God, the
creator of all the world and all men and women” (145). Revealingly, religious
imperialism is followed by other forms of British imperialism. Indeed, colonization
is represented in the novel as beginning with the arrival of Anglican
missionaries and as ending with a more obviously political and economic
agenda. Even without this economic and political dimension, however, the
missionaries appear to threaten the tribe’s very existence. Okonkwo, for
example, is prescient in viewing the rise of Anglicanism and the death of Igbo
culture as coterminous:


Suppose when he died all his male children decided to follow Nwoye’s steps
and abandon their ancestors? Okonkwo felt a cold shudder run through him
at the terrible prospect, like the prospect of annihilation. He saw himself and
his fathers crowding round their ancestral shrine waiting in vain for worship
and sacrifice and finding nothing but ashes of bygone days, and his children the
while praying to the white man’s god. (153)


At numerous points Achebe’s novel even associates the arrival of the Anglicans
with the “death” of the clan and the massacre of Africans (138–9).

Things Fall Apart reveals the great extent to which religious missionaries
were part of a comprehensive strategy of colonization, in which the Church
functioned as a beachhead for political and economic imperialism. As one
Umuofian tells Okonkwo, echoing the novel’s title,


The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion.
We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won
our brothers . . . And we have fallen apart. (176)


At countless other points in the novel it is made clear that “the white man
had not only brought a religion but also a government” (155);46 that British
“religion and trade and government” (174) (what one critic calls “the colonial
trinity”47) were inseparable from one another; that “The new religion and
government and the trading stores were very much in the people’s eyes and
minds” (182–3). The novel cements the structural connection between religious
and economic imperialism by reminding readers that, formally speaking, the

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titular head of the Church of England is the reigning monarch, Queen
Victoria, herself, “the most powerful ruler in the world” (194). The head
of the English Church and the British Empire, revealingly, are one and the
same woman.

Paradoxically, the “imagined process of ‘civilization’ that the British believed
they were giving to the savages”48 is instead revealed in Things Fall Apart to
lead to cultural disintegration and social chaos: the breakdown of Igbo society.
As Frantz Fanon writes in his revolutionary The Wretched of the Earth, the
goal of “colonial domination” was “to convince the natives that colonialism
came to lighten their darkness,” when in fact it functioned as a means of
establishing control and mastery.49 E. M. Forster points to the same duplicity
in his 1924 novel A Passage to India, another study of British colonial ambitions,
when he has Aziz think: “This pose of ‘seeing India’,” so popular with
English visitors to the subcontinent, “was only a form of ruling India.”50
Things Fall Apart similarly represents the inseparability of knowing and conquering,
of understanding and mastering the “Other.” As Achebe concludes
in his influential essay “Colonialist criticism,” for the colonialist, “understanding
[the native] and controlling him went hand in hand – understanding
being a pre-condition for control and control constituting adequate proof of
understanding.”51

That the fledgling colonial entity is associated by Achebe with corruption,
coercion, and hypocrisy only sharpens and deepens the novel’s critique of
British rule. The kotma or “court messengers, African agents of empire who
in effect functioned as the ‘colonial police’,”52 are depicted in Things Fall
Apart as violent, cruel, bribe-taking enemies of Igbo tradition (197), as
implants who come from an entirely different region of Nigeria. Even the
fledgling imperial justice system, it is suggested, is corrupt; in a property
dispute, for example, the “white man’s court” finds in favor of a family that
has “given much money to the white man’s messengers and interpreter” (176).
Put simply, Igbo culture is depicted as more “republican and egalitarian”53
than British culture, with its monarchy, empire, and centralized power
structures.

Yet Things Fall Apart is more nuanced and complex in its treatment of
encroaching colonialism in Nigeria than has so far been suggested, with significant
implications for what Ashton Nichols calls Achebe’s “subtle critique
of the politics of point of view.”54 For in addition to reclaiming and rehabilitating
Africa’s “past” – a past, in Nigerian critic Chinweizu’s words, which has
been “vilified by imperialism” and “imperialist education”55 – Achebe’s novel
seeks to understand why so many Africans embraced Anglicanism, an entirely
foreign religious worldview. This surprising attraction is explored most directly
in the allure of the British Church to Okonkwo’s son Nwoye:

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It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand
it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow.
The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a
vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul – the question of the
twins crying in the bush [in Igboland twins were regarded as evil and were
abandoned at birth to die] and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. (147)


In other words, certain arguably inhumane practices of the Igbo are successfully
addressed and redressed by this “new” religion. More influential than this
new theology, however, was the new economic opportunity brought by British
trade. We read at one point, for example, that “The white man had indeed
brought a lunatic religion, but he had also built a trading store” and “much
money flowed into Umuofia” (178). As Achebe puts it elsewhere:


the bounties of the Christian God were not to be taken lightly – education, paid
jobs and many other advantages that nobody in his right senses could underrate.
And in fairness we should add that there was more than naked opportunism
in the defection of many to the new religion. For in some ways and in certain
circumstances it stood firmly on the side of humane behavior. It said, for
instance, that twins were not evil and must no longer be abandoned in the
forest to die.56


Ultimately, Things Fall Apart is more ambivalent than many readers have
admitted when it comes to the comparative merits of Igbo and British modes
of understanding; neither culture is seen as possessing a monopoly on “truth”
and both are ironized in the light of the other. Indeed, Achebe’s “problematic
nostalgia” is perhaps best understood as a by-product of what JanMohamed
calls the author’s “ambivalent attitude toward his characters and their respective
societies.”57

Achebe’s ambivalence in this regard points to an important implication
of the novel: that “one’s very perceptions are shaped by the social and cultural
context out of which one operates,”58 and that one’s perceptions, therefore,
are open to question and “correction.” Despite his spirited defense of Igbo
religious integrity and dignity (179–81), his compelling portrait of a “poetic”
Igbo culture that possesses “a philosophy of great depth and beauty,”59 and
his powerful denunciation of the hypocritical and hubristic British colonial
mentality, “the cultural ethnocentrism that denies the validity, and even the
existence, of African customs, law, and morality,”60 the author, at a still deeper
level, eschews definitive cultural allegiances of any kind in this novel. Rather,
Things Fall Apart reveals the power and intrinsic logic of both worldviews:

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for Christians the world is divided into believers and heathen (for the British,
into the “civilized” and the “savage”); for the Igbo, into “free-born” tribesmen
and taboo “osu,” outcasts who live “in a special area of the village” and who
carry with them the mark of their “forbidden caste – long, tangled and dirty
hair” (156). Achebe’s implication is clear: as different as these ways of dividing
up the world may be, they nevertheless share a need to celebrate and legitimate
the self at the expense of an undeserving other. Freud’s observation, in his
Civilization and Its Discontents, about this ineradicable human need is as
applicable here as it is to Golding’s novel: “It is always possible to bind
together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other
people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.”61

The challenge of imagining the “Other’s” legitimacy is traced, and its
failure lamented, everywhere in Things Fall Apart. On both sides of the British/
Igbo cultural divide we encounter characters – Okonkwo and Reverend Smith,
most importantly – who see things as “black or white” (184), and those –
Obierika and Mr Brown, for example – who are capable of seeing reality in
shades of gray. Although the Igbo appear to be more willing to tolerate difference
than the British (“You can stay with us if you like our ways,” a Umuofian
at one point informs Reverend Smith; “You can worship your own god. It is
good that a man should worship the gods and spirits of his fathers” [190] ),
the same cultural blindness and religious invidiousness are depicted as being
potent forces in both camps. On the Igbo side, in contrast to Okonkwo’s
monological rigidity stands Obierika’s willingness to question his culture’s
worldview. In response to Okonkwo’s uncritical assertion that “the law of
the land must be obeyed,” for example, Obierika admits, “I don’t know how
we got that law” (69). Obierika is described as “a man who thought about
things . . . But although he thought for a long time he found no answer. He
was merely led into greater complexities” (125).62 At one point Obierika’s
eldest brother speculates that “what is good in one place is bad in another
place” (73–4), while at another Uchendu, a fellow tribesman, remarks, “There
is no story that is not true . . . The world has no end, and what is good among
one people is an abomination with others” (141). One Umuofian thematizes
the novel’s concern with the “politics of point of view”63 when he observes
that Reverend Smith “does not understand our customs, just as we do not
understand his. We say he is foolish because he does not know our ways, and
perhaps he says we are foolish because we do not know his” (191).

This same tension between dialogic and monologic modes of understanding
exists on the British side as well. For example, in contrast to Mr Brown’s respect
for dialogue, his “compromise and accommodation” (184) (“Whenever
Mr Brown went to [a certain] village he spent long hours with Akunna . . .
talking through an interpreter about religion. Neither of them succeeded in

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converting the other but they learned more about their different beliefs” [179] ),
Reverend Smith, his successor, sees “things in black and white. And black was
evil. He saw the world as a battlefield in which the children of light were
locked in mortal conflict with the sons of darkness” (184). Conversely, “The
over-zealous converts who had smarted under Mr Brown’s restraining hand
now [in Reverend Smith’s day] flourished in full favor” (185). One of these
“over-zealous” coverts, Enoch, even hopes to wage a “holy war” against his
former tribesmen (188).

The cultural myopia if not blindness of most British colonists is most
powerfully revealed in the novel’s justly famous closing moments, when we
learn of Okonkwo’s suicide by hanging, which follows his murder of a court
messenger, and of Umuofia’s reluctance to bury him.64 It therefore remains
for the British to bury Okonkwo, which leads the District Commissioner, in
the closing paragraph of the novel, to remark to himself:


In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts
of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District
Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged
man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of
him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. As he
walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him
some new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and
hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole
chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any
rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out
details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The
Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. (208–9)65


Astounding ironies of perspective and diction proliferate and reverberate in
this passage. Not only do the words “pacification” and “primitive” here strike
the reader as hypocritical misnomers, but the novel’s final paragraph juxtaposes
a reductive understanding of Okonkwo with our psychologically and culturally
nuanced understanding of him, which the novel has treated in all of its
complexity and subtlety for over 200 pages.66 Yet it is Achebe, as one critic
argues, who in writing Things Fall Apart “pre-empts an attempted white usurpation”
of Okonkwo’s story and culture, “trapping the ‘official version’ within
a more sympathetic history.”67 That is to say, the irony of the novel’s closing
paragraph backfires on the District Commissioner himself, and on the imperial
mentality that seeks to rationalize his colonial ambitions. It is the British

– and not the Igbo – view that is revealed here to be the more parochial,
delimited, and backward one.
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This brings us, at last, to Achebe’s choice of a title for his provocative
colonial novel. This choice is both resonant and apposite: not only does the
title – taken from W. B. Yeats’s prescient poem “The Second Coming” –
literally make sense, as Umuofia does seem to “fall apart,” but it figuratively
makes sense as well, as it alludes to the (normally violent) clash of civilizations.
The aptness of Achebe’s choice of title, as one reader puts it, is


indicative of a profound pondering on Yeats’s vision of history as a succession
of civilizations, each containing the seeds of its own destruction because no
single enclosed social order has so far succeeded in containing the whole range
of human impulses and aspirations.68


This insight perhaps best explains the novel’s cultural pluralism and perspectival
democracy: like languages, cultures, rather than being permanent, “pure,” or
complete, are mutable, partial, and open to external influence. Few in Things
Fall Apart acknowledge the porous nature of culture, and the result, for many,
is lethal.

In his essay “The truth of fiction” Achebe blames our “self-centeredness”
and lack of “imagination” for our failure


to recreate in ourselves the thoughts that must go on in the minds of others,
especially those we dispossess. A person who is insensitive to the sufferings
of his fellows is that way because he lacks the imaginative power to get under
the skin of another human being and see the world through eyes other than
its own.69


This visualizing of the other – this phenomenological exercise – may be a
“truth” that “fiction” best affords. It is in any case an imaginative recreation
that Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, if not the novel’s British or African characters,
powerfully and poignantly achieves.