Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
or some years of his life, the name of this Nigerian author was
Albert Achebe, a name that today rings oddly on our ears. Discarding the name of Queen Victoria’s prince consort during
his university years and assuming the African name was a harbinger
of Achebe’s future success. He may today be the most widely known
indigenous African writer: more than eighty million copies of this
novel have been printed, and it has been translated into more than fift y
languages.
This 1958 novel, mostly set in the time just before the start of colonialism in Nigeria, takes its title from a line in W. B. Yeats’s powerful poem “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart; the center cannot
hold.” The dissolving entity is the culture of the Tho or Igbo people,
the world of Okonkwo. Proud and fierce, Okonkwo embodies many of
the qualities most highly regarded by his tribe. His physical prowess is
great (his defeat of the wrestler Amalinze the Cat spread through the
nine villages that make up Umuofia), and he has great determination to
command respect through his manner and his achievements.
Readers who want Okonkwo to be entirely admirable by modern
standards are headed for disappointment. He has enormous respect for
his ancestral spirits, but this familial regard is not showered on all relatives he has personally known. His contempt for his “lazy and improvident” father Unoka is equaled by his disgust with his son Nwoye, whom
he sees as “degenerate and effeminate.” Further, when tribal elders
determine that the boy Ikemefuna, who has been a kind of foster child
in his household, must be killed, he insists on joining in the process,
over the advice of the elders. He has three wives and beats them all.
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June