THINGS FALL APART

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