Things Fall Apart

"I think what’s so fantastic about it is that it’s sort of portentous, if that’s the right word, in that it captures that moment between the end of colonisation and independence, and the inevitable crushing of Africa’s dreams. I can’t remember exactly when it was written, but it was very early on in the process. It sounds really pessimistic – I mean, it’s a beautifully written book, but it’s the way in which the fate takes over. There was an endemic inevitability about things falling apart, almost through nobody’s fault. And there are people nobly fighting against that. It sounds like a terribly pessimistic, self-flagellating book about how Africa’s independence came too soon. In some ways it is, but it’s also about the nobility of individuals trying to stop things falling apart. I read it when I was quite young and I didn’t know what a parlous state Africa was really in, and this gave me a historical context for it all."

"Yes, this is not a history book, but it is absolutely compulsory reading for anybody who wants to understand the impact that the Europeans had on Africa—particularly those of the missionaries. The colonial officers were accompanied by missionaries intent on ‘civilising’ Africa. Chinua Achebe really captures in this masterpiece the tensions of that period. We still discuss the impact of the Christianising mission of the colonial officers in the building of institutions. Some people say, Look, it was good, the Brits came with their bookkeeping and accounts and literacy. But Achebe writes about how African values were eroded, people began to question the validity of their own value systems, and to advance they had to, essentially, become black British men and women, or black French men and women. Achebe captures all this—the rejection of African traditional beliefs and value systems—and in my view it is a book that should be read alongside the histories, because it shows how these tensions are still relevant today. Because things literally fall apart. Their centuries-old way of living was completely challenged by these new norms. The hero ends up committing suicide. It’s a very, very tragic story, because he felt that all he had aspired to, in the end, was reduced to nothing. I was talking to the Vice Chancellor of Lagos University a few months ago. She was wearing her beautiful African clothes, and she said: A few decades ago, I would never have turned up like this, I would have been in my business suit, you know? Now, she said, look at the students; they are all wearing their African clothes, African hairstyles. They are rejoicing in their Africanness. They want to forge a future based on their African traditions. This book is very important. It is a historical document. I don’t know how old he would be if he were alive today. But if you think that his grandmother would have been telling him stories about life before the British, and he would have used a lot of that knowledge. He wrote the book when he was 28. So it is, in my view, a historical book in that it is based on oral tradition. And the kind of debates that historians have to this day is very much supported by this book. Yes, I think it can be both. This is a debate that a lot of writers—not just African—face. There is this idea that you should preserve your language. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan writer, wrote in English, then switched to his native Kikuyu. So this is a debate that is often had. I think that it doesn’t matter Chinua Achebe didn’t write it in his native language, Igbo. It was translated into Nigerian languages, and many other languages because it is a book with international resonance. I think it’s a bit of a sterile debate. Because books can be translated. Having said that, I do believe in the preservation of local, indigenous languages. We are seeing ‘first language attrition’ right across Africa, in Francophone, Anglophone and Lusophone countries. But I don’t think Chinua Achebe writing in English distracts from his masterpiece. If anybody were to read only one book about Africa, I’d put Things Fall Apart right at the top of my list."

"It’s because of its importance in the African canon and just how important Chinua Achebe himself is. I confess to not being a big fan of the text itself. That’s taboo in African literary circles, you are just supposed to genuflect before it and say it’s great. One of the things Achebe does really well is that, if you look at the context in which he’s writing, it’s after years of colonisation in which one of the most insidious things that western colonialism did was that it tried to deny Africans a history. Africa was just supposed to be this blank slate. Africans were supposed to have been timeless: they never developed, they never advanced, they never had any ideas until the Europeans came along. And then they started imposing. History really starts when the Europeans conquer Africa. “If I watch a BBC historical film, if there’s a black person in there they’re going to be a slave or a servant or something. That’s pretty much guaranteed. That’s all you’re going to ever see. And so, reading these texts, it is empowering.” What Achebe is doing is almost a way of writing that back in, to say there was a culture, there were really intricate social and economic systems that existed before colonialism, that were disrupted by that process. The example that I have is of myself growing up and being educated in post-independent Zimbabwe. Our history curriculum was still very heavily weighted towards European history. There were normally small chunks of African history that you just digested before you moved on to European history, which is supposed to be world history, which is supposed to be the more important stuff. What Achebe shows you in this book is that there are a lot of really interesting cultural and historical events that you could cover—if you were only willing to go back and look at them. And I think that’s why that novel has been so successful and so important. I haven’t studied the text—as opposed to reading the book—so I don’t know how accurate his depictions are. But, certainly, I think if there were gross inaccuracies then the Nigerian readership would have brought those to the fore by now. No, it just doesn’t appeal to me. It’s one of those things—like other times when people thrust a book on me and say, ‘This is a really great book’ and, for some reason, I just didn’t connect with it. It’s definitely not one of my favourites. I read it once and that was enough. Again, this is probably taboo as an African novelist, but after Things Fall Apart , I’d had enough of Achebe. I just left it. It’s disgraceful, I know. That would just be a very obvious choice. I was hoping, certainly, to show other texts that whoever reads this might not have encountered before. My only regret, perhaps, is not getting Walter Scott in there, with Waverley , but I can live with that. This is where we come back to that very difficult definition of what a historical novel is and how the canon, and history itself, is constructed. Because there certainly were books that had very strong historical elements before Waverley but what scholars tend to do is to call these ‘proto-historical’ novels. So, you’re not allowed to acknowledge that they are historical—you call them ‘proto-novels’—you classify them as such. You’re throwing away all these books and then you’re saying that Scott is the first historical novelist. I mean, what Scott does for his own time is that he wrote a great book, and it is a fantastic text. But I think it’s just that process of, ‘ well, we need something in the canon to say that this is the first .’ “When a historian picks up an artefact or a document and says, ‘Here’s the Magna Carta,’ the next thing they do is construct a narrative around it. By virtue of their training and their special skills, we’re then supposed to accept this narrative as truth.” A lot of people assume that Achebe is the first African novelist. There were all these novels before him, but, somehow, this movement solidifies around Achebe to give him this primary importance. And, so, you almost start from Achebe and virtually discard everything else before him. And I really think this is what happens with Waverley . The Hungarian Marxist thinker György Lukács does a lot in promoting this idea that what Waverley shows is the Marxist idea of an the individual and the grand economic power structure. He says what Scott does is far more advanced than anything that had come before – so, this is what you can definitely call the first historical novel. I think it’s convenient for scholars to call it that—at least you have a starting point—but even now these ideas are being challenged."

"It almost feels like a cliché to say that this is one of my favourite books. But there is no way you can escape this book. It is such a part of African literature. It is an inescapable classic. It is a brilliant feat of storytelling, the economy of it, the brevity, the imagery, the ear he has for the traditional language. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter This is the story of Okonkwo, one of the chiefs in the village who rose from poverty and becomes one of the leading figures. He is a leader and local wrestling champion in Umuofia, a fictional group of nine villages in Nigeria, inhabited by the Igbos. He tries to stick to the tradition that he knows and is hopeless when confronted with the modern. He cannot wrap his mind around change in the form of the British and the missionaries and ultimately he is destroyed by that. Even though it is a tragic story you are still captivated by it."