These are slides from a lecture on the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

1. Things Fall Apart by
Chinua Achebe
Dr. T. Tsehloane

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 British colonialism. It
shatters the stereotypical 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. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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”.

10. 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

11. 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.

12. Things Fall Apart
• Counter-Text to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
• Nature and Development of the main character
• Setting of the novel

13. Achebe on Eurocentric Depiction of Africa
and Africans
• “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”

14. Achebe on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
• “Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as the other world the
antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilisation, a place where man’s
vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by
triumphant bestiality”.
• “The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely
that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth
is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white
racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its
manifestations go completely unremarked”.

15. Achebe on Conrad
• “Africa as a setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as
human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all
recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at
his peril…The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and
Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to
foster in the world”.

16. Achebe on Conrad
• “Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was
strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth”.
• “But the victims of racist slander who for centuries have had to live
with the inhumanity it makes them heir to have always known better
than any casual visitor even when he comes loaded with the gifts of a
Conrad.”
• (Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa”)

17. Timeline of the Debate
• 1899 Heart of Darkness
• 1958 Things Fall Apart
• 1975 “Image of Africa”

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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?