Life & Background
Achebe was born in Ogidi in eastern Nigeria in 1930 to Igbo parents who had converted to Christianity, and grew up between the mission church and the traditional practices of the village — a doubled position that runs through his work. He studied at University College Ibadan, where reading Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson convinced him that Africa needed to be written from within. He worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service, and Things Fall Apart appeared in 1958, two years before Nigerian independence. He served as an envoy for Biafra during the civil war of 1967–70, an experience that turned him towards poetry and essays. A car accident in 1990 left him using a wheelchair, and he taught in the United States, at Bard and then Brown, until his death in 2013.
Things Fall Apart
Okonkwo is a wrestler, farmer, and titled man of Umuofia, driven by fear of resembling his father, who died in debt and without title. He rises through work and hardness. He takes in Ikemefuna, a boy given to the village in settlement of a dispute, and when the oracle decrees the boy's death Okonkwo strikes the killing blow himself so as not to appear weak. After accidentally killing a kinsman at a funeral, he is exiled for seven years. He returns to find missionaries established, a colonial court and district commissioner in place, and his own son converted. When a church is burned and the village elders are detained and humiliated, Okonkwo kills a court messenger, finds that his people will not go to war, and hangs himself. The Commissioner considers giving him a paragraph in his book on the pacification of the tribes.
Achebe writes in English but shapes it with Igbo proverbs, speech rhythms, and narrative digressions, arguing in his essay on the African writer and the English language for an English altered to carry African experience rather than abandoned. The novel's structure is its argument: two thirds establish Umuofia as a functioning society with law, religion, art, and its own cruelties before colonialism appears, so that the reader has something to measure the loss against. The title from Yeats and the final paragraph's shift into the Commissioner's voice — reducing a whole life to an anecdote in a colonial memoir — demonstrate the erasure the book was written against. Okonkwo is not idealised, and his rigidity is part of what fails.
Why Achebe Matters
Things Fall Apart is the most widely read African novel, translated into more than fifty languages, and the founding text of the modern African novel in English; Achebe also served as founding editor of Heinemann's African Writers Series, which brought a generation of writers into print. His 1975 lecture An Image of Africa, attacking Conrad's Heart of Darkness as racist, is one of the most cited interventions in postcolonial criticism. His essays on language, on the novelist as teacher, and on the colonisation of the mind are standard reading alongside Ngũgĩ's, whose opposite conclusion about writing in English makes the pairing a common examination question.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Things Fall Apart1958
- No Longer at Ease1960
- Arrow of God1964
- A Man of the People1966
- Girls at War1972
- Anthills of the Savannah1987
- Hopes and Impediments1988
- There Was a Country2012