Worth It?
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
That evening the Mother of the Spirits walked the length and breadth of the clan, weeping for her murdered son. It was a terrible night. Not even the oldest man in Umuofia had heard such a strange and fearful sound, and it was never to be heard again. It seemed as if the very soul of the tribe wept for a great evil that was coming — its own death.
Things Fall Apart is a difficult book for me to read as a Christian.
Its protagonist, Okonkwo, is a successful patriarch in what we now call Nigeria. The majority of the book follows Okonkwo, his family, and his tribe (the Ibo) through daily life in their village Umuofia: marrying, dying, farming, building, celebrating, mourning, worshiping. And then the British come, and the novel’s title tells you the rest.
The title, by the way, is taken from W.B. Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming,” which begins like this:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world….
In the evangelical Christian circles I run in, this poem is often cited as a description of what happens when the world loses sight of God and the transcendent moral order. In Chinua Achebe’s novel, however, it’s used to indicate what happens to traditional African culture after Christian Britain walks in. The novel ends, in fact, with Okonkwo’s suicide, as he is unable to bear what he sees as the spiritual degeneration of his tribe. In a very literal sense, Okonkwo himself falls apart, and by extension the old way of life dies with him.
What Okonkwo finds so appalling about British colonization is not primarily physical oppression, though that is certainly a factor. The most damning effect of colonization is what Okonkwo perceives as his tribe’s effeminacy: the erosion of its willingness to resist the imposition of a strange new religion, code of law, and set of values. One reason for this unwillingness is fear of the Brits’ superior physical force. But another is division, division created by the number of Christian Ibo converts who have, in the eyes of Okonkwo and his friends, effectively joined the British against their own people. As Okonkwo’s friend Obierika puts it,
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 our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.
You can see why I have difficulty with this book. I mourn the destruction of a traditional way of life, only to be brought up short by the accusation that my religion was responsible for this destruction.
And I’m left with the question, “Is it worth it? Is it worth destroying a tribe to bring them the gospel?”
The easiest way around this question is to say, “No, it’s not worth it, because the gospel is not worth sharing.” For those who aren’t Christians, I imagine that this seems like the obvious answer. But I don’t think Christians can affirm the second half of that statement in good conscience. If the gospel is what we believe it is, if it is truly the only stable source of eternal life and fulfillment and joy and freedom, then it is totally worth sharing.
So we’re back at the dilemma. If sharing the gospel means destroying a traditional way of life, is it worth it? If those are our only two options, I think the difficult answer is that yes, it is worth it. But this is one binary that ought to be deconstructed. The only way I can bear to look Things Fall Apart in the face is if there is a third option, a way of harmonizing the glory of the gospel with the glory of cultural expression. And I think there is.
When Okonkwo’s son, Nwoye, first hears the missionaries, he is captivated:
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 and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth. Nwoye’s callow mind was greatly puzzled.
Nwoye’s eventual conversion offends Okonkwo so much that Nwoye flees to live with the missionaries, taking the name Isaac. He anglicizes. Okonkwo is deeply ashamed. But what I think Achebe hints at in the above passage, despite the novel’s general ambivalence toward Christianity, is that the missionaries did bring something that the Ibo needed to hear. The Ibo practiced the infanticide of twins, for instance, leaving them in the jungle to die. Ikemefuna, a boy from another tribe whom Nwoye grew up with as an adopted brother, was eventually sentenced to death — killed by the hand of Okonkwo, his adopted father — after a decree from the gods. What Nwoye hears in the missionaries’ speech is a way of life that allows him to make sense of the evil he intuitively senses in these acts. Even Achebe would agree, I think, that this is a good thing.
Additionally, in my reading of the novel, the church doesn’t bear the brunt of the blame for the Ibo’s denigration. The government does. When it’s just the church they are confronted with, the Ibo are able to deal with the Christians. They give them the most undesirable plot of land for their church, they ostracize them and on one occasion block their access to the water supply — they’re able to coexist with the new religion without losing their cultural dignity. But then the British set up a District Commissioner and a court of law in Umuofia; then the British start to back the Christians with force. At one point, an overzealous Christian convert defiles one of the Ibo’s most sacred religious traditions. To avenge the honor of their gods, the Ibo come to the British missionary and explain that they will not harm him, that he is welcome to live with them and worship his god, but that they must burn down his church. They do so. In response, the District Commissioner invites six of the village’s leaders (including Okonkwo) to discuss the event, but instead has them imprisoned until the village can pay off the fine he has decided to impose on them. The Commissioner’s guards (men from other tribes) abuse the men while they are held captive.
It is this sort of humiliation, and the inability to resist it, that ultimately breaks the Ibo tribe and breaks Okonkwo. But it is a humiliation that comes primarily at the hands of governmental force. It’s crucial that we notice this: if we want to accurately reflect the love of Christ, we must separate the exercise of force from the sharing of the gospel. Without the backing of the British administrative system, the church at Umuofia had a difficult time, facing ostracism and sometimes physical harassment. On some levels this sucked for the Christians, but hey — none of this should have been unexpected. Persecution is a thing we are called to accept joyfully. The Christian’s responsibility is to face persecution with grace and truth, not by calling in the military to teach the persecutors a lesson. Things Fall Apart teaches me that we respond this way, in meekness, not only because we ought to, because it’s the right thing to do — but also because it’s a sign of respect for the people we are among.
This brings me back to the third option, the one that breaks apart the binary between the gospel and non-Western culture. That binary is based on a system of colonization, in which religion is part of an attempt not just to preach the gospel but also to impose a particular culture on the people deemed “backward.” It’s a way of thinking that assumes total superiority of the missionary’s culture over native culture, and to that extent it’s a way of thinking that fails to fully recognize the humanity of the people the missionary is sent to serve. By contrast, Achebe, in a separate article, asks the West to see Africa “quite simply as a continent of people — not angels, but not rudimentary souls either — just people, often highly gifted people and often strikingly successful in their enterprise with life and society.” The missionary who comes to the field with the attitude Achebe recommends cannot see evangelism as a process of domination or of cultural imperialism. Her goal will be incarnation.
Think about it. The gospel we preach is one in which the Son of God saved by becoming one of us. He didn’t bother with questions of inferiority or of barbarism; he simply loved us, recognizing we needed a High Priest who was like us in every way. He put aside his power, the force he could have exercised, to enter our world and speak to us as we are. The missionary who wants to imitate Christ, then, will be one who seeks to become like the people she serves in order to share with them the good news of eternal life. She will not seek to recreate them in her image; she will serve them by recreating herself. Of course, every culture (including the missionary’s own) has habits and practices that are incompatible with the call to follow Christ. The missionary will identify these and speak and live accordingly. But she will not make the mistake of assuming that because a group of people is unsaved, their entire way of life is therefore polluted and unhealthy, something to be grown out of. Christ condemns our sin, but he does not condemn our humanity; every culture is in some way sinful, but no culture is on that account condemned.
On the contrary, God is the Creator of all cultures in all their diversity just as he is the Creator of all people in their diversity. And just as people become more themselves the more they approach their Creator — the more you walk with God, the more you become the person you’re meant to be — even so each individual culture becomes more fully itself, more beautifully particular, the closer it gets to God. Yet this can only happen if the missionary sees her role as one of cultural assimilation, not cultural domination.
Incarnation and colonization are opposites; unfortunately, the Church has not always understood this, and much evil has been done as a result. Things have fallen apart that ought to have held together — that ought to, in fact, have been made stronger. But the Church can find — and, I would argue, the Church has in many instances found — a way of rejoicing in the particularity of the image-bearers around it and sharing the gospel for the perfection of that image. (Don Richardson’s Peace Child is one example of what this looks like, I think.) In the end, there need not be a conflict between cultural expression and the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Incarnation transforms without external force; the joy of the Lord is for all peoples; the Holy Spirit perfects, not abolishes, culture. This is the gospel we preach. And it’s totally worth it.
Should I read it? Things Fall Apart is certainly worth reading for its portrayal of Ibo life before and after colonization — and as this article has suggested, that portrayal raises a lot of thought-provoking issues. It is, essentially, a missionary story told from the perspective of a man who didn’t convert, and that makes it a really helpful work for Western Christians to grapple with, I think.
