Things Fall Apart

A novel about Okonkwo, a man of standing in an Igbo village in what is now southeastern Nigeria, and about what happens to his authority — and to the society that granted it — when British administration and Christian mission arrive in the 1890s. Achebe wrote it in English, and part of the point was to narrate that encounter from the inside rather than from the deck of a European ship.

It is worth noting that this list also carries Heart of Darkness. Achebe’s 1975 lecture “An Image of Africa” was a direct attack on Conrad’s novel and on the tradition of writing Africa as a backdrop, so the two titles sitting in the same curriculum is a live argument rather than a pairing.

Context: Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) published Things Fall Apart in 1958 as the first volume of what became the African Trilogy, with No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964). It is the most widely read work of African fiction in English.

Connections

• Chinua Achebe — the author.
• Nigeria — the setting.
• Africa — the wider subject.
• Heart of Darkness — on the same list, and the book Achebe spent a famous lecture arguing against.
• Literature