Literature -A different version of Africa

1. Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe

2. Chinua Achebe
• Born in 1930, in a village called Ogidi in South Eastern Nigeria.
• Went to University College, Ibadan for undergraduate studies.
• Worked for Nigerian broadcasting service (NBS)
• In 1966 his work was interrupted by the Nigerian civil war, when
South Eastern region attempted to breakaway to form the
independent state of Biafra.

3. C. Achebe
• After the war, he was appointed as a Senior Research Fellow at
University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
• Later on he was appointed in several universities abroad.
• He has received numerous awards and honours throughout the
world.
• He is a recipient of the Nigerian National Merit Award
• In 2007 he won Booker International Prize for Fiction
• He has written over twenty books: novels, short stories essays and
collections of poetry.
• He died on 21 March 2013 aged 82.

4. Famous Works
• Things Fall Apart (1958)
• No Longer at Ease (1960)
• Arrow of God (1964)
• A Man of the People (1966)
• Girls at War (1972)
• Anthills of the Savannah (1987)

5. Chinua Achebe
• Author’s first and most influential novel.
• Published 1958.
• It has sold over ten million copies.
• Has been translated into more than fifty languages.
• Breakdown of traditional African culture in face of European
colonisation in the late nineteenth century.
• It reflects on this important historical encounter from the point of
view of the Africans, the subjects of colonisation.

6. Challenging the Canon
• Achebe published Things Fall Apart as a response partly to what he
considered to be distortions and fabrications by Eurocentric novels, such as
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson that
treat Africa as a primordial and cultureless foil to Europe.
• As a text, Things Fall Apart is set in the 1890’s and portrays a precolonial
African society and its subsequent encounter with the advent of British
colonialism. It shatters the stereotypical European notions about Africa
and Africans.
• Achebe depicts a traditional African society as complex with advanced
social institutions and traditions prior to its contact with Europeans.
• He conveys a fuller understanding of African culture and thus giving voice
to an underrepresented and previously denigrated colonial subject.

7. Challenging the canon
• “The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa
produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light
and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with
the need to justify the slave trade and slavery…This continued until
the Africans themselves, in the middle of the twentieth century, took
into their own hands the telling of their story”

8. Achebe on Conrad
• Achebe’s criticism of Conrad focuses on three main points
1. Through his narrator Marlow, Conrad portrays Africa as a blank
space
• He does so not because the land was uninhabited, but because such inhabitation was of no
consequence to Europe
2. The Africans in the novel are depicted as virtually without
language
3. Achebe argues that the predominant modernist readings of the
text render Africans absent
• In such interpretations Africans serve as substitutes for a European indisposition

9. Achebe on Conrad
• For Achebe Africa and Africans in the novella are “mere metaphors
for the break-up of one petty European mind”
• Africa’s darkness stands for the animality lurking in the civilised
European heart
• Africa’s darkness therefore comes to symbolise Europe’s fears of
evolutionary reversion
• Forever tied to this symbolism, Africans no longer exist as
(independent) human beings
• They are reduced to representatives of a long past era in evolutionary
history possessing primordial human traits

10. Achebe on Conrad
• Does Achebe sufficiently take into account the historical context in
which the novella was written?
• Does he analyse the contradictions in the novella?
• Does he differentiate between narrator/author? Is this a necessary
distinction?
• What did Achebe want to achieve by criticising Conrad in this
deliberately provocative manner?

11. Edward Said’s Orientalism
• Illustrates the manner in which the representations of Europe’s
Others has been institutionalised since the eighteenth century as a
feature of its cultural dominance.
• Europe associated itself with order, rationality and symmetry.
• Non-Europeans were seen as inferior and associated with disorder,
irrationality and primitivism.
• Myth, opinion, hearsay and prejudice assumed the status of received
truth.

12. Achebe as a writer
• Believed in the power of literature to create and initiate social
change.
• Influenced other African writers to write stories from the point of
view of their own people.
•
• Pioneer and advocate of the need for the Africans to tell their own
stories from their own perspective.

13. Achebe’s mission as a writer
• “I believe in the complexity of the human story, and that there's no
way you can tell that story in one way and say, 'this is it.' Always there
will be someone who can tell it differently depending on where they
are standing ... this is the way I think the world's stories should be
told: from many different perspectives”.

14. Epigraph
• Turning and turning in the widening gyre
• The falcon cannot hear the falconer
• Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
• Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
• WB Yeats

15. Epigraph
• The epigraph hints at chaos that arose when an established social and
political system collapses.
• It is a reference to the collapse of the traditional African tribal system in
the wake colonial invasion.
• Challenges the conventional notion of European colonialism as an
imposition of order.
• Colonialism disrupted African history and brought chaos.
• It can also be an ironic reference to the imminent disintegration of the
British colonial empire.
• The book was published just two years before Nigeria attained its
independence in 1960.

17. Setting
• Egwugwu (Masked Ancestral Spirits of the clan who appear during
certain rituals/ They are also the last court of appeal)
• Council of Elders (Ndichie)
• Titled Men
• Ordinary men
• Women and Children
• Osu (Outcasts)

18. Setting
• Cosmic structure based on the unity and interaction of all beings in
the universe.
• Harmony, order and peace are maintained when two dimensions of
reality (spiritual and physical) are in tune with each other.
• Polytheistic: system of gods or deities (Ani and Agbala).
• Chi: The ambivalent role of the personal guardian spirit
• Intermediaries (priests/priestesses and medicine men/women).
• Will of the gods and ancestors revealed through the Oracles and
medicine men.

19. Setting and Context
• The center and the major setting is a particular African village
settlements in South Eastern Nigeria amongst the Igbo people.
• A society controlled by particular norms, rules and obligations.
• Not everybody was in agreement.

20. Setting and Context
• Only males are involved in decision making in family and in broader
society.
• Politically, there were no kings and chiefs.
• Socially, titles and social status were earned not inherited.
• Hospitality was highly valued and was an important part of social
interaction and culture.

21. Structure of the Novel
• Part One (Pre-Exile)
• Umuofia
• Part Two (Exile)
• Mbanta
• Part Three (Post-Exile)
• Umuofia

22. Themes
• Adaptability and Integrity.
• Choice and Fate.
• Principle and Survival.

23. Characterisation 1
• Okonkwo
• Unoka
• Obierika
• Okonkwo’s wives
• Ikemefuna
• Nwoye
• Ezinma
• Uchendu

24. Characterisation 2
• Kiaga
• Mr Brown
• Mr Smith
• Okoli
• Enoch
• District Commissioner
• Court Messengers or Kotma

25. Characterisation
• “Mr Brown’s successor was the Reverend James Smith and he was a
different kind of man. He condemned openly Brown’s policy of
compromise and accomodation. He saw things as black and white.
And black was evil. He saw the world as a battlefield in which the
children of light were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of
darkness. He spoke in his sermons about sheep and goats and about
wheat and tares. He believed in slaying the prophets of Baal”. 134

26. Characterisation
• Brown is peaceful and respectful towards the indigenous religious
beliefs and practices in his approach to get converts.
• He is for accommodation and compromise between the two belief
systems.
• Smith, on contrary, invokes hatred and conflict to spread Christianity.
• It is through this hard line approach that Enoch one of his converts is
emboldened to unmask one of the ancestral spirits.

27. Okonkwo
• “Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even
beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements”.
• “That was many years ago, twenty years or more, and during this time
Okonkwo’s fame had grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan”.
• “He had no patience with unsuccessful men. He had no patience with
his father”.

28. Okonkwo
• Motivated by fear.
• Obsessed with reputation.
• Prize masculinity and violence.
• Abhors gentleness and idleness.
• Hence his dislike of his father Unoka and his son Nwoye.
• His reasons for his rise are the same for his fall.

29. Characterisation
• How are characters depicted in the novel?
• African characters? or European characters
• Male and female characters.

30. Narrative Perspective
• A third person of view
• Communal perspective
• Afrocentric perspective
• Balanced and reflective of both the contending sides

31. Colonial Encounter
• Colonialism: violent disruption of the established way of life by a
foreign invader.
• Why did some Africans accept the new way of life and became
converts?
• Why did some Africans refuse to change their old way of life in face of
the new order?
• Was it wise to surrender and survive or is it an excuse for cowardice?
• Is it foolhardy or brave to fight to the end against a powerful invader?

32. The End: Last Chapter
• The reflections of the District Commissioner after the death of
Okonkwo.
• Sudden change of narrative perspective from Umuofia communal
perspective to a colonial perspective.
• Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
• “As he walked back to the court, he thought about that book. Every
day brought him some new material. 151-152