Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In Things Fall Apart, author Chinua Achebe writes beautifully and powerfully rooted in the West African culture and heritage of his native Nigeria. He depicts a painful historical moment where the tribes of West Africa are being colonized and pacified by the British Kingdom. The novel was written in three movements, the first one describing the ancestral roots of the protagonist Okonkwo, the mighty and proud warrior of Umuofia. Here, we see the tribalism of the clan, its animistic superstitions and religious practices, its social and cultural conventions untainted by the white colonizers. Okonkwo is a self-made man. His father was an alcoholic and left him nothing so he learned to fend for himself very early on and became a renowned warrior of his clan by beating another older and more experienced wrestler in a celebrated annual wrestling match. But Okonkwo is also a conventional man. He fiercely clings to the traditions that have made him who he is and fights to preserve them. Although he sees the changes happening around him, he is unable or unwilling to change. This fatally proves his undoing in the end.

A sudden and tragic turn of events makes him and his whole family to go into exile for seven years. The second movement of the novel takes place during this exile. Okonkwo had to leave it all behind. His exile takes place in his mother's ancestral land and tribe where he is confronted with the importance the role the mother plays not only in the life of the men she bears but of the whole tribe. A warrior such as Okonkwo placed an outsized value in his role as man in his societal context, but it is in his motherland where he comes to understand if not accept that ''Mother is Supreme''. Everything in society is touched by the role many men, including him, belittled in their treatment of women. In some of the tribes women were indeed regarded as the weaker or lesser sex. We see this in Okonkwo's profound longing for his second wife's daughter Ezinma to have been a boy. He also feels relieved when his exile comes to an end and he can return to the tribe and land of his father. Okonkwo is an extremely resilient man. He comes back home, he rebuilds what he had lost and works, if ultimately without the success, to regain the standing he once had among his clansmen.

Things Fall Apart's third and final movement confronts us with the relentlessness of the passage of time and inevitable change in Umuofia after Okonkwo's return. Here the presence of the colonial white man who has come to evangelize the natives with his Christian faith becomes a constant. Even here, Achebe's keen eye and honesty discriminate between the gentle, grassroots missionary movement of the firtst mission to arrive in the tribe and the fruit of those first missionary efforts, and the heavyhanded successive missionary work that increased ill will toward the white man. This imperial white man had come to impose his institutions of law and order so that a new way of doing things was established without regard for the societal norms already present in the life of the clan. We see the reversal or, worse yet, the wiping out of the old ways that the tribe knew so well for new and alien forms of governing the affairs of the tribe. The tribe yields to the new ways, but Okonkwo suffers and resents the changes. He believes the elders and the warriors of the clan should fight to preserve what has been to that moment their way of life. But the tribe realizes the futility of the endeavor. It won't be able to stop the winds and the tide that are already being felt. Okonkwo loses the battle in the process.

Chinua Achebe was undoubtedly the premier of the modern African writers in the 20th century and gave voice to a true African experience in literature. His voice as an author comes with authority and confidence, but is not devoid of humor. He delivers a prose that is genuinely African, and beautiful and detailed in its richness of culture both in its precolonial and its colonial stages. In Okonkwo we see the fire of a fearless and proud people, but in the changes that so rapidly descend upon all the tribes we see the sorrowful quenching of that same fire. Religion plays a potent role in the development of the plot and we see the encounter, clash would describe it better, between the animism of the local tribes vs the Christianity of the white man. We know which faith won. In the case of Okonkwo's oldest son Nwoye, Christianity won him over not because it had powerful dogmas but because it has powerful "poetry"- the new religion is able to speak to the soul.

Things Fall Apart allows us to feel the sorrow and pain of a people who cannot withstand the colonizing power of a foreign nation. Many good things happen in the process - a new economy, education, the Christian faith-, but many tragic ones too, including what happens to the protagonist Okonkwo. Things Fall Apart will remain with the reader because of its genuineness and the ease with which such a powerful but fatal story is told.


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