Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Okonkwo is the greatest wrestler and warrior alive, and his fame spreads throughout West Africa like a bush-fire in the harmattan. But when he accidentally kills a clansman, things begin to fall apart. Then Okonkwo returns from exile to find missionaries and colonial governors have arrived in the village. With his world thrown radically off-balance he can only hurtle towards tragedy.

Things Fall Apart is a seminal work of African literature. Set in the 1890s on the cusp of Nigeria’s colonisation in the Partition of Africa, it describes the gradual transformation of Okonkwo’s village from one deeply rooted in Nigerian customs and hierarchy to one heavily influenced by English Christianity.

The events in the blurb do not in fact happen until quite a way through the book, and less is made of Okonkwo’s wrestling successes than I had anticipated. This means that we are given a detailed context of the events leading up to Okonkwo’s accidental killing of the clansman, and this includes the telling of folktales, descriptions of the customs observed at the time in the Igbo community, the farming and market timetables and the usual character development.

Okonkwo’s outlook is traditional and conservative. He sets a lot of store by the idea of being a strong man, which means resorting to violence to ensure discipline or to uphold customs, and outwardly displaying no emotions other than anger. I did not like him as a character but Achebe’s descriptions enabled me to be sympathetic to his perspective, even if I did not agree with him. His strict loyalty to tradition makes it all the more jarring for him when he returns to his village to find that it is now under the control of Western governors and Christian missionaries.

The subject matter of Things Fall Apart may not seem especially ground-breaking to us now as we have become increasingly aware of the brutality and devastating effect of colonisation in Africa and other parts of the world. When it was published in 1958, however, it was the first novel in English which portrayed those events from the point of view of the colonised party. In fact, it was original in describing even the everyday life of an African from that African’s perspective, rather than a white man’s perspective. This paved the way for other African authors and it now often appears on lists of the greatest novels ever written.