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Book Reviews: February
Charles Mcnair
Segments & Pages
Things Fall Apart
Sula,
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Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe’s famous book, Things Fall Apart, now in 50 languages and 8 million copies worldwide, is arguably the best-known written work by any African writer … if we don’t include Moses, that Egyptian author, and his five notable books of the Old Testament.
Author Achebe in 2007 won Great Britain’s version of the Pulitzer, the Man Booker Prize, for a lifetime of work attempting to tear down stereotypes about African life – and in particular African life before the arrival of the white man. Achebe at last finds himself in his 77th year with the world’s attention – he’s known as the Father of African Literature – and Anchor Books, a subsidiary of Random House, has a handsome new 50th anniversary issue of Things Fall Apart. Achebe’s book has stayed in print for 50 years at a time when most novels have a shorter shelf life than a package of Twinkies.
Things Fall Apart tells the story of daily life in a Nigerian tribe, the Igbo, before its fall from grace. That fall, of course, comes in the form of white colonization. Achebe makes a case for how Christianity and its European champions caused tribes living in relative harmony to abandon their customs and traditions. The writer believes this cultural unmooring led to the disintegration of Africa’s complex, well-ordered tribal societies and then to disillusionment, corruption and poverty.
This book is fascinating. It brims over with small and large details of African tribal household life, religion, law, marriage, meals, conversations, codes of friendship. Achebe renders a fully realized world, ethical within its own codes. It’s a lifestyle not even remotely like the savage and primitive fiction in Tarzan movies or in the fevered pages of Western classics like Heart of Darkness.
Achebe’s second-best-known work, in fact, is an essay that assails Joseph Conrad for his “thorough racism,” as Achebe puts it, in presenting pre-colonial Africa as savage. The real savagery, Achebe argues, came when white missionaries began to blindly dismantle a culture without a single spiritual care for the effect it might really have on the soul of the Dark Continent.
Things Fall Apart is a story as rich in cultural revelation as a movie like, say, Dances With Wolves. But Achebe gives us, instead of an immersion into the world of the American Plains Indian, a bed in a hut and a path through an Evil Forest and a seat at a tribal council in the farmlands of west Africa.
Here’s a taste of Igbo life, with an introduction to the protagonist of the book, the hawkish, man’s man, Okonkwo:
… in the nine villages of Umuofia a town crier … asked every man to be present tomorrow morning. Okonkwo on his bamboo bed tried to figure out the nature of the emergency – war with a neighboring clan? That seemed the most likely reason, and he was not afraid of war. He was a man of action, a man of war. Unlike his father, he could stand the look of blood. In Umuofia’s latest war he was the first to bring home a human head. That was his fifth head, and he was not an old man yet. On great occasions such as the funeral of a village celebrity, he drank his palm-wine from his first human head.
If it sounds shocking, read on. Okonkwo and every other villager share lives bound on all sides by laws and customs, conservative and often harsh, but always strictly observed. The Igbo abandon all newborn twins, which they believe bring very bad juju, to death in the jungle. The tribespeople itch and twitch with such superstitions, and even demand human sacrifices at times. Still, in the context of Igbo spiritual belief, these acts are as orthodox as holy communion or the reading of the Torah.
Okonkwo brings to mind flawed Greek heroes like Oedipus or Hercules. The great warrior lords it over three wives and his children, flashing enough hubris to let us sense that pride and his dominating sense of manhood just might hobble him in the end. Still, like the best Greek plays, the inevitable path toward Okonkwo’s downfall packs such drama that it’s impossible to look away.
Still, it’s not always easy to look. Especially if you’re a woman. This is no country for old feminists, or new ones. Wives in the Igbo world are bought with yams and cowries, those little seashells, or with goats. Okonkwo’s three wives each cook a dish for him every meal, and they risk beatings for even small mistakes.
In the end, Christianity drops like a deus ex machina suddenly into the jungle. The faiths of the white men and black men come into a great contest. It will spoil a fine read to say too much of all this in a radio review, but I do want to close this way.
For the Igbo, worldly events were governed by dozens of frightful gods. But we’re told the villagers believed in a greater god, above all others, and that these lesser gods were simply delegates of the One Big Guy upstairs. “We approach a great man through his servants,” explains a villager to a missionary. “It is right to do so.”
One might think of Achebe, this novelist, in just such a way. He is a delegate sent to us by the lasting and immortal Great Spirit of literature. This book will make you believe in him.
The book is Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe.
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Related Links
Buy Devil in a Blue Dress
Buy Things Fall Apart
Buy Sula
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