A society forever changed in Things Fall Apart

I’m not quite sure what to make of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. According to Wikipedia it is the most widely read novel of African Literature. I appreciate that it is a wholy different book that what many western readers will pick up, but I can’t quite call it a game-changing novel.

It tells the tale of a man, Okonkwo, who lives before and just at the onset of colonial Nigeria. He is famous in his village as a very hard working man, and he is strict with his wives and children. He considers his father as a weak man, so he wants to always exude strength. A great part of the novel deals with showing the kind of man Okonkwo is, with short little tales about life in the village, most only a chapter or two long. In that way, it can almost be considered a book of short stories, as many times the tales do not connect other than the characters, until the last third of the book that is.

Once we get there, the changing point in the book is when Okonkwo accidentally kills a man during a celebration. The punishment is an automatic 7 year banishment from the village, which Okonkwo as a willful member of society accepts immediately without argument. He moves his large family to his mother’s old neighboring village and turns his crops over to a friend to care for the next 7 years. While he is in exile, something changes the landscape of all the villages and the people’s lives. White men come.

The first village they come to do not accept the newcomers, and the whole village is slaughtered by the white men’s superior weaponry. When the Europeans come to the other villages, they are begrudgingly admitted, and there the settlers start building churches to their one God, as well as setting up government and laws over the villagers. Many people start converting, but Okonkwo stands by his faith in the gods of his ancestors, and upon returning home after his 7 years away, he beheads a white man during a protest. They come after him, and find him at his house hanging, as he has killed himself. This is against all of his people’s teachings, but he accepted that their life is dead, and so he must be too.

It is a powerful book, and I did really enjoy reading a new perspective on life that I am not exposed to. Perhaps it is because the novel is written in English, obviously not Achebe’s first language, but I felt a certain disconnect. Could also just be that it is so foreign for me. It is eye-opening, and I truly felt for Okonkwo and his people as they lost the parts that made them unique. Reading what I’m writing now, maybe it is more profound than I originally gave it credit for. I’m going to put this one back on the shelf to re-read one day, and see if my thoughts have changed by then.