Things Fall apart by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Nigerian fiction

Source – Personal copy

I don’t know about you, but sometimes as a reader, you see a post on Instagram, it makes you change the reading plans you had for the coming month. That happened when I saw there was an African reading challenge this month. I do hate that sometimes African literature is lumped together. We don’t say, ” let’s have a European lit month or an asian month we tend to break it down to a single country. But that aside, it gave me a nudge to read a couple more books than I have been. I used to read a lot more literature from around Africa when the blog started, and i just think the last few years I haven’t read as much as I used to. In fact, talking about this month reminds me of Kinna and her wonderful blog and her love of the Ghanaian literature scene and the wider African lit scene, a much-missed corner of the blogging world. Anyway, my first book this month is a reread, and I picked it because I have the other books in Chinua Achebe’s African trilogy, but it seemed silly reading book two, which I hadn’t yet read, so I reread Things Fall Apart, one of the cornerstones of the first wave of African novels in post-colonial times.

Okonkwo did not have the start in life which many young men usually had. He did not inherit a barn from his father. There was no barn to inherit. The story was told in Umuofia of how his father, Unoka, had gone to consult the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves to find out why he always had a miserable harvest.

The Oracle was called Agbala, and people came from far and near to consult it. They came when misfortune dogged their steps or when they had a dispute with their neighbors. They came to discover what the future held for them or to consult the spirits of their departed fathers.

A world of Oracles and mystic views of the future a tradtional IGBO way of life

In fact, if any book captures the post-colonial struggles, it is this book it is from the tales Achebe was told as a child by his parents as part of the Igbo oral tradition of storytelling that led to the seed of this book, a story of one man and the struggle of the traditional Igbo world and the coming of Christianity in the country.  Okonkow is the leader of his clan a man that is a larger than life figure a champion wrestler a sort of African Muhamded ali I had in y my mind both times I read the book. But he becomes a man haunted by events that happened in his life around a child he treated like a son, and then his gun blows up, and they are exiled.  This then leads him to a clash with the church, as the time he has spent in exile after his gun blew up and killed the son of a rival leader, leading to the exile.  This has seen the village change as the missionaries have started to make inroads, leading to more conflict as his world is changing and falling apart.

Ogbuefi Ezeudu, who was the oldest man in the village, was telling two other men who came to visit him that the punishment for breaking the Peace of Ani had become very mild in their clan.

‘It has not always been so,’ he said. ‘My father told me that he had been told that in the past a man who broke the peace was dragged on the ground through the village until he died. But after a while this custom was stopped because it spoiled the peace which it was meant to preserve.’

‘Somebody told me yesterday,’ said one of the younger men, ‘that in some clans it is an abomination for a man to die during the Week of Peace.’ It is indeed true,

, said Ogbuefi Ezeudu. “They have that custom in Obodoani. If a man dies at this time he is not buried but cast into the Evil Forest. It is a bad custom which these people observe because they lack understanding. They throw away large numbers of men and women without burial. And what is the result? Their clan is full of the evil spirits of these unburied dead, hungry to do harm to the living.’

Before the church  crept in to his world the way of life was different

I loved this book when I read it. It captures the IGBO tribe as it was when he grew up, a tribe that, like many, saw changes with the white man’s arrival. It also had for me a great character in Okokow a man that is larger than life a figure that jumps of the pages of this book. You sense he is part of a lot of the stories the young Achebe heard from his parents, but then fleshed out to make him not just a strong leader but also a flawed man with his own demons and ghosts, as you read how his world is changed as he is there, but after he comes back from exile. I said this is one of the cornerstones of early post-colonial Nigerian fiction. Achebe was a champion and editor of the African Writer Series, as well. For me, it is books like this, the African Writer Series, that did so well, bringing to a wider world voices like Achebe. I wish I had read more of his books over the years, but I will now read the other books in this trilogy and the couple of other books I have by him. Have you read this book? How did it affect you?