His Early Years
Chinua Achebe was
born in 1930 in Eastern Nigeria. His father was Isaiah Achebe, an early
Christian convert among the Ibo people. He taught in the Church Missionary
Society’s Village School where Chinua was educated. Chinua went on to
University College Ibadan and graduated in Literature, History and Modern
Studies, having followed an essentially British education.
A Hugely Successful Writer,
Politician and Literary Celebrity
A career with the Nigerian Broadcasting
Corporation took him on journeys all over Nigeria, which gave him some of the
material and inspiration to write about the history of the Ibo people. Things
Fall Apart, written in 1958, ‘was an act of atonement with my past, the ritual
return and homage of a prodigal son’. The massacre of the Ibos of Northern
Nigeria in 1966 and the ensuing civil war, culminating in the attempt to form
the independent state of Biafra, took him into politics. Later he became a
university lecturer in Nigeria and, later, in the USA. He has published other
novels, poetry and short stories, one of which, ‘Dead Men’s Path’, is to be
found in the OCR anthology Opening Worlds.
Things Fall Apart
The novel is
loosely based on events that took place in the time of Achebe’s grandfather,
Okonkwo, on whom the central character in the novel is based. Its three parts
describe: The life of the Ibo
people before the arrival of white people: 13 short, largely selfcontained
chapters, illustrating various aspects of the way of life of the Ibo people in
a culture of tradition but also of questioning those traditions. Okonkwo’s seven
years of exile and the arrival of the colonial culture of missionaries,
bureaucracy and white officialdom; the effects of that arrival, including the
conversion of Okonkwo’s son Nwoye and his subsequent alienation from his
father. How the white
people’s law, education, power and economics strangle and destroy the whole Ibo
culture as described in the first section; Okonkwo’s return to Umuofia after
his exile and his tragic end. This is the essential novel about the
colonisation of Africa, written from the point of view of the indigenous
African. It has been translated into over forty languages and is as widely read
and admired today as when it was first published in 1958.
Achebe’s Cultural Background
The
book sets out in absorbing and entertaining detail a whole culture which is
likely to be quite different from anything within the experience of most people
who set out to read and study the text for the purposes of examination,
interest, or sheer pleasure. It goes on to show the gradual disintegration of
this culture when it is attacked by another. Neither anti-colonial diatribe,
nor sentimental attempt to rediscover a lost paradise, the novel maintains an
objective and impartial view of a society going through a metamorphosis, with
the goods and bads of the old and the new weighed in the balance for the reader
to judge. It is a profit-and-loss account which is finely balanced and movingly
portrayed.
Contrasting Cultures
Achebe said
that Things Fall Apart was ‘an act of atonement with my past, the ritual return
and homage of a prodigal son.’ He wished to teach his (African) readers that
‘their past … with all its imperfections … was not one long night of savagery
from which the Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them’. In the novel,
both the native Ibo culture and the white people’s culture have strengths and
weaknesses. Achebe asks us to contemplate what it is in the former, perhaps as
embodied in the portrait of Okonkwo we have just looked at, that contributes to
its disintegration. The central idea of the novel, therefore, is neither to
support nor condemn either of the rival cultures that are presented, but to
hold up a mirror to its readers and challenge them with their own strengths and
weaknesses and those of their way(s) of life. It is not about colonisation or
the rival claims of coloniser and colonised: rather about the rival claims of
individual self interest and expression versus the essential need for loyalty
to the clan/tribe/nation. Where these come into irreconcilable (and at times
only partly understood) conflict, things fall apart. Our mission is to
understand Achebe’s analysis of how that happens in the Ibo society he
delineates, which, to repeat, is embodied in the portrait of Okonkwo. The
portrait of the white men at the end of the story, therefore, embodies a series
of pressure points that serve to crack, uproot and destroy what has seemed to
be a society in which there is a place for everything and everything is in its
place. The Ibo culture at the heart of the novel offers some striking points of
comparison with modern western European culture. For example:
- The importance of ceremony in every aspect of life: eating, drinking, marriage, war, religion.
- The way in which life is underpinned by the rhythm of the seasons, marked by festivals: ‘Peace week’, ‘The Feast of the Yam’ etc.
- Rites of passage that are based on tradition: birth; initiation into adulthood; betrothal; marriage; death.
- The overriding importance of kinship: extended family duties and responsibilities. The security and emotional attachments that kinship entails.
- The all-pervasive influence of the gods, who on occasion ‘possess’ certain individuals to express their commands (the egwugwu, the priestess and so on).
- The extraordinarily rich language: folk tales; proverbs; conversational formulae; vivid and varied use of metaphor.
- The strictly observed conventions of war and peace within the nine settlements, which are rendered powerless by the arrival of the white people.
- A society that appears to be male dominated, but worships an earth mother.
- An economic system: based principally on barter.
- A hierarchical system of respect based on a meritocratic system of rewarding the most successful, not the highest born; a rigid sense of justice and fairness; and total obedience to both human and spiritual authority
GCSE English and English
Literature for OCR
A Different Cultures Text Things
Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
© Harcourt Education Limited,
2006
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