Chinua Achebe · 1958
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is the foundational novel of modern African literature in English. Published in 1958 — two years before Nigerian independence — it has sold over twenty million copies in fifty languages and remains the most widely read African novel in the world. Achebe wrote it partly as a response to the European literary tradition's treatment of Africa: he was specifically responding to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which he had encountered as a student and which he found unbearable in its representation of African people as backdrop to European psychology.
The novel is set in an Igbo village in southeastern Nigeria in the 1890s. Its protagonist, Okonkwo, is a respected warrior and yam farmer who has built his standing through hard work and stoic discipline, driven by his desperate determination not to resemble his lazy, musical, "effeminate" father Unoka. Over the novel's three parts, Okonkwo's life is increasingly disrupted by: an accidental killing that leads to his seven-year exile; the arrival of European Christian missionaries; the imposition of British colonial administration. The novel ends with Okonkwo's suicide after he kills a colonial messenger and realises his village will not rise with him.
The first two-thirds of the novel are dedicated to a careful, detailed depiction of Igbo culture as it functioned before the European arrival:
The detail is doing argumentative work. Conrad and the European tradition had treated African societies as if nothing existed in them worth representing. Achebe's novel shows that something did exist — and that it had the complexity, the rituals, the ethical disputes, the comic moments, the small jealousies, the philosophical disagreements that any society does.
Okonkwo is built on the classical tragic apparatus, with modifications. He has a hamartia — his terror of being seen as soft, which produces his stoic harshness, which alienates him from his son Nwoye, which produces some of the actions that lead to his fall. He has a reversal — the accidental killing that exiles him from his village. He has recognition — his slow awareness, after his return from exile, that the world he had ruled has changed beyond his ability to navigate.
What Achebe adds: Okonkwo's tragedy is not just personal. It is also the tragedy of a culture that produced the kind of man Okonkwo became — and that the colonial intervention prevents from producing his kind of man any longer. The individual and the collective tragedies coincide.
The title comes from W. B. Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" (1919):
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…
Achebe's choice of Yeats is significant. Yeats was an Irish modernist writing about the collapse of the post-WWI European order. Achebe was taking Yeats's metaphor and applying it to the colonial intrusion into Africa — making the same image work for an event Yeats had not been imagining. The novel is, in this respect, an exercise in postcolonial reframing: the European poet's vocabulary used to name the moment from a different vantage.
The novel's third part begins with the missionaries' arrival. Achebe is careful in his depiction: the missionaries are not uniformly cruel. Mr Brown, the first missionary, attempts to understand local custom; he wins converts through patience. Mr Smith, his successor, is uncompromising and aggressive. The colonial machinery, however, runs the same way regardless of which individual administers it — the District Commissioner and his court messengers replace the clan's authority with British law.
Achebe's argument is structural: the colonial intervention is not primarily about good or bad individual Europeans. It is about the systematic replacement of one form of authority with another, and what that replacement does to a people whose previous authority no longer has any standing.
The novel's last paragraph is one of the most discussed endings in twentieth-century fiction. After Okonkwo's suicide, the District Commissioner — who has narrated little of what we have just read — reflects on the case:
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.
The novel's final move is to reveal that everything we have read — the whole, detailed, complex story of Okonkwo's life and his community's destruction — will be reduced, in the colonial historical record, to a paragraph in a book titled "Pacification of the Primitive Tribes." The juxtaposition is the novel's argument: the colonial archive will reduce the lived reality to a footnote in a story whose title is itself an act of euphemism. The novel we have just read is the recovery of what that footnote covered.
Achebe's 1975 lecture "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" is one of the most influential pieces of postcolonial criticism ever delivered. Achebe argued that Conrad's novel is unreadable as serious literature given its treatment of African people. The lecture is famous; the novel is the prior, more durable response. Things Fall Apart represents the interior life that Conrad's novel had refused to acknowledge existed. The novel itself is the rebuttal.
The novel is written in English — the colonial language — but in a register inflected with Igbo proverbs, rhythms, and patterns of thought. Achebe's argument: the African writer must use the colonial language because it is the language of education and access, but must remake it in the writing. The English of Things Fall Apart is, in his phrase, "the English of his ancestors" remade.
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