Things Fall Apart: Chinua Achebe, 1958
1958 · book
Things Fall Apart was published in London in 1958 by a Nigerian writer of twenty eight. Chinua Achebe set it in the Igbo village of Umuofia in the years before and during the arrival of British missionaries and colonial administration at the end of the nineteenth century. Its central figure, Okonkwo, is a wrestler and a man of standing, hard on himself and harder on his family, whose determination not to resemble his gentle and indebted father becomes the shape of his life.
The first part of the book describes the village on its own terms, its farming year, its marriages, courts, gods and proverbs, without translation into European categories. Only then do the missionaries arrive, and their arrival is shown as a small thing that becomes a large one. The book does not idealise what was there before, since the community it describes has its own cruelties, and that refusal is a large part of why it has lasted.
Achebe wrote in English, a decision he defended and reconsidered throughout his life, but he wrote an English carrying the rhythms of Igbo speech and thick with proverbs, and in doing so he showed a generation of African writers that the language of the coloniser could be made to carry their own material. He said later that he had written in part because the Africa he met in European novels was not a place he recognised, and his lecture on the depiction of Africa in a famous English novella remains one of the sharpest pieces of literary criticism of the century.
The novel has sold more than twenty million copies and has been translated into over sixty languages. It is the most widely read African novel and is taught everywhere from Lagos to Ljubljana, usually as the first book a student reads that describes a colonised society from the inside.