Seven. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
1958, Everyman’s Library, 181 pages. Written in English, read in English.
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The introduction to this book states it quite bluntly: If you’re well read, and you’ve read just one book by an African author, it’s probably this one. And it’s true, at least in my case — because I’ve never sought out books by African authors (or any other authors just for the sake of their nationality, for that matter), and even this book, which name has been familiar to me when I’ve seen it in the Essential 100 list — because it has been used by The Roots as the name of their fourth album, was brought to my attention just because it was the first book on the list.
Chinua Achebe was an author and professor in Nigeria in an interesting part of its history — his first book, “Things Fall Apart”, being published only two years before Nigeria gained its independence from the British empire. The book deals, in three parts, with the seam between these two periods, and the way the country has struggled to maintain two different realms of its identity, by following the arc of the rise and fall of its protagonist, Okonkwo.
The first part is structured like a Nigerian traditional tale. It introduces us to Okonkwo, who is described as a “strong man” in his village, and briefly explains how he gained his stature. It describes his three wives and children, his compound, his yam farm and its origins and his way of life, and then zooms out to the life of the whole village and Okonkwo’s place there.
In the second half of the book, Okonkwo experiences a personal misfortune, that serves as a harbinger of a communal misfortune, as the British take over Okonkwo’s part of Nigeria and strive to deploy their culture, values and way of life on the Ibo population. A Christian pastor tries to build his church, literally and figuratively, within the premises of the village and encounters a lot of resistance, but also several converts. Okonkwo tries to lead a revolt against this new threat and discovers that in this new world, in which there are different rules, serving different gods, he is no longer a strong man. Unable to find his place in this new world, he eventually bows out in a final scene which serves to demonstrate in the clearest way the cultural clash between the Ibo and British traditions.
Chinua Achebe published this, his first book, when he was 28, and his life contained a lot of parallels to the story. He was also born and raised in an Ibo village, like Okonkwo, and while his parents were converted Christians who gave all of their children both Christian and traditional African names, he has enjoyed, and tried to maintain a connection with, the traditional ways and the indigenous gods. By way of contrast to Okonkwo, Achebe embraced the British value system, primarily its educational aspects, and made his way up in several prestigious schools in Nigeria, eventually becoming a professor of literature in the university of Ibadan, and then in several universities in the United States. He was one of the proponents of writing Nigerian novels in English, defending the language of the previous conquerors as a way to pave a way of the Nigerian traditions to the wider world. At least in my case, he has succeeded in that regard.
