Things Fall Apart Summary and Study

Guide
Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist and author of 'Things Fall Apart,' a work that
in part led to his being called the 'patriarch of the African novel.'

UPDATED: JAN 19, 2021

(1930-2013)

Who Was Chinua Achebe?

Chinua Achebe made a splash with the publication of his first novel, Things
Fall Apart, in 1958. Renowned as one of the seminal works of African
literature, it has since sold more than 20 million copies and been translated
into more than 50 languages. Achebe followed with novels such as No
Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964) and Anthills of the
Savannah (1987), and served as a faculty member at renowned universities
in the U.S. and Nigeria. He died on March 21, 2013, at age 82, in Boston,
Massachusetts.
Early Years and Career

Famed writer and educator Chinua Achebe was born by Albert

Chinualumogu Achebe on November 16, 1930, in the Igbo town of Ogidi in
eastern Nigeria. After becoming educated in English at University College
(now the University of Ibadan) and a subsequent teaching stint, Achebe
joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in 1961 as director of external
broadcasting. He would serve in that role until 1966.

'Things Fall Apart'

In 1958, Achebe published his first novel: Things Fall Apart. The

groundbreaking novel centers on the clash between native African culture
and the influence of white Christian missionaries and the colonial
government in Nigeria. An unflinching look at the discord, the book was a
startling success and became required reading in many schools across the
world.

'No Longer at Ease' and Teaching Positions

The 1960s proved to be a productive period for Achebe. In 1961, he married

Christie Chinwe Okoli, with whom he would go on to have four children,
and it was during this decade he wrote the follow-up novels to Things Fall
Apart: No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964), as well as A
Man of the People (1966). All address the issue of traditional ways of life
coming into conflict with new, often colonial, points of view.

In 1967, Achebe and poet Christopher Okigbo co-founded the Citadel Press,
intended to serve as an outlet for a new kind of African-oriented children's
books. Okigbo was killed shortly afterward in the Nigerian civil war, and
two years later, Achebe toured the United States with fellow writers Gabriel
Okara and Cyprian Ekwensi to raise awareness of the conflict back home,
giving lectures at various universities.

Through the 1970s, Achebe served in faculty positions at the University of

Massachusetts, the University of Connecticut and the University of Nigeria.
During this time, he also served as director of two Nigerian publishing
houses, Heinemann Educational Books Ltd. and Nwankwo-Ifejika Ltd.
On the writing front, Achebe remained highly productive in the early part of
the decade, publishing several collections of short stories and a children's
book: How the Leopard Got His Claws (1972). Also released around this
time were the poetry collection Beware, Soul Brother (1971) and Achebe's
first book of essays, Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975).

In 1975, Achebe delivered a lecture at UMass titled "An Image of Africa:

Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness," in which he asserted that Joseph
Conrad's famous novel dehumanizes Africans. When published in essay
form, it went on to become a seminal postcolonial African work.

Later Work and Accolades

The year 1987 brought the release of Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah. His

first novel in more than 20 years, it was shortlisted for the Booker
McConnell Prize. The following year, he published Hopes and
Impediments.

The 1990s began with tragedy: Achebe was in a car accident in Nigeria that
left him paralyzed from the waist down and would confine him to a
wheelchair for the rest of his life. Soon after, he moved to the United States
and taught at Bard College, just north of New York City, where he remained
for 15 years. In 2009, Achebe left Bard to join the faculty of Brown
University in Providence, Rhode Island, as the David and Marianna Fisher
University professor and professor of Africana studies.

Achebe won several awards over the course of his writing career, including
the Man Booker International Prize (2007) and the Dorothy and Lillian
Gish Prize (2010). Additionally, he received honorary degrees from more
than 30 universities around the world.

Death

Achebe died on March 21, 2013, at the age of 82, in Boston, Massachusetts.

QUICK FACTS
  Name: Chinua Achebe
 Birth Year: 1930
 Birth date: November 16, 1930
 Birth City: Ogidi, Anambra
 Birth Country: Nigeria
 Gender: Male
 Best Known For: Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist and author
of 'Things Fall Apart,' a work that in part led to his being called the
'patriarch of the African novel.'
 Industries
o Education and Academia
o Fiction and Poetry
 Astrological Sign: Scorpio
 Schools
o University of Ibadan
 Nacionalities
o Nigerian
 Death Year: 2013
 Death date: March 21, 2013
 Death State: Massachusetts
 Death City: Boston
 Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION
 Article Title: Chinua Achebe Biography
 Author: Biography.com Editors
 Website Name: The Biography.com website
 Url: https://www.biography.com/writer/chinua-achebe
 Access Date:
 Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
 Last Updated: January 19, 2021
 Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
QUOTES
 Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of
reality from that which is given to him.
 When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for
him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.
 One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be
compromised.

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OVERVIEW

Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, is Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe’s first
novel. Simultaneously portraying the traditions and beliefs of Nigerian Ibo culture
and engaging with the narrative of European colonialism in Africa, Things Fall Apart
uses one man’s story to speak for many.

Achebe’s plot centers on Okonkwo, a passionate man focused on reaching the

apex of masculine virtue in his home village, Umuofia. As a child, Okonkwo notices
his father’s “feminine” and dishonorable behaviors: Unoka is lazy, pleasure-seeking,
and debt-ridden. As a young man, Okonkwo seeks to “[wash] his hands” of his
father’s legacy through intense hard labor (8). He wins glorious wrestling victories,
leads his village to war, and builds a thriving farm. Quickly, he is on track to earn
titles within the community, markers of power and influence.

Okonkwo’s first troubles come with Ikemefuna’s arrival. The product of an

exchange intended to avoid war between two villages, Umuofia and Mbiano,
Ikemefuna ends up in Okonkwo’s household. Though his adjustment is not
immediate, he quickly becomes Okonkwo’s favorite. Okonkwo is satisfied by
Ikemefuna’s influence over his oldest son, Nwoye, with whom he is constantly
disappointed; with Ikemefuna around, Nwoye acts more like a man and less like his
grandfather, Unoka. But when Umuofia’s Oracle, Agbala, demands Ikemefuna’s
death, Okonkwo releases him and participates in his murder.
Agbala also demands Okonkwo’s daughter, Ezinma, and Okonkwo tries to protect
his favorite biological child. Though Okonkwo, his wives, and his friends respect the
authority of their gods and ancestors, they find following these commands difficult.
Okonkwo faces punishment if he treats his wives or peers too harshly. Even when
Okonkwo, his friend Obierika, and Nwoye question the will of the gods or ancestors,
their adherence to the family structure remains firm. Rituals, drum summons, and
Oracle appearances always happen at night, in the darkness; the mysterious
darkness holds a powerful sway over Okonkwo, his family, and his kinsmen, and
their community beliefs help them maintain stability and unity in times of conflict.

Okonkwo accidentally shoots the son of an elder during ritual gunfire at the elder’s
funeral, and in response to his crime, he and his family must leave the village for
seven years. Transplanted to Mbanta, the village of his mother, Okonkwo mourns
the loss of the future for which he worked so hard. Though he continues to hold
high expectations for himself and build new wealth and influence, his distance from
the tribe means that he expects to work to earn honor upon his return.

While Okonkwo and his family are in Mbanta, white missionaries arrive in Umuofia.
The unfamiliar church wins over the village’s outcasts; eventually, a preacher visits
Mbanta and converts Nwoye. Nwoye abandons his family to join the church; this
fracture in the structure of the social system indicates a greater fracture that the
white men’s arrival catalyzes.

Upon return to Umuofia, Okonkwo discovers that the white man’s religion has
become political, too. The colonial administration imprisons men when they follow
local tradition. Though one missionary, Mr. Brown, coexists effectively with the
villagers, the next, Mr. Smith, incites deep-seated conflict. As he collaborates with
authorities, specifically the District Commissioner , Mr. Smith deepens the rift in
Umuofia.

Mr. Smith encourages an overzealous convert, Enoch, to unmask an egwugwu, an

elder who embodies a spiritual ancestor. This crime profoundly offends the
villagers, and the egwugwus burn down his church. The District Commissioner
tricks Okonkwo and five of Umuofia’s other leaders into prison, and the villagers
scramble to post bail for these powerful men. When they return, Okonkwo wants to
declare war.

Before the villagers can decide how to solve their conflict, messengers arrive to
dissolve their meeting. Rather than engage in conversation, as leaders have so far,
Okonkwo responds directly: he decapitates a messenger. Disappointed with his
fellow villagers’ cowardice, Okonkwo flees the scene and commits suicide. When
messengers return to Umuofia, asking for Okonkwo, his friend, Obierika, leads them
to his hanged body and asks that they remove it: his body is unclean, for suicide is
a great evil, and his fellow villagers cannot bury him with their own hands.

The novel ends with entry into the District Commissioner’s consciousness, as he
conceives of the story of Okonkwo as a detail in his colonial narrative, The
Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

Things Fall Apart Background

AUTHORIAL CONTEXT

Chinua Achebe is arguably the world’s most widely-read African author. Born in
Nigeria in 1930, he belonged to the Igbo people, the same community at the center
of Things Fall Apart—though in the book the tribal name is stylized as “Ibo.”
Notwithstanding that he was born roughly 40 years after the events in Things Fall
Apart, Achebe experienced firsthand many of the same political, cultural, and
religious divides found at the heart of the novel. For example, around 1900
Achebe’s father Isaiah became one of his community’s earliest converts to
Christianity. A Protestant who raised his son in the Christian Church, Isaiah
nevertheless continued to honor the traditions of Odinani, his ancestors’ traditional
faith. This balance between Western and African traditions is reflected in Achebe’s
full name, Albert Chinualumogu Achebe. While Albert is a European name,
Chinualumogu is a traditional Odinani prayer that means “God is fighting on my
behalf.”

The man Achebe would grow into reflecting this uneasy balance between Igbo
traditions and the West. The author refused to go by Albert, changing his name to
an abbreviation of his middle name, Chinua. Achebe’s rebellion against the
Christian name given to him by his father is an inversion of the relationship
between

Things Fall Apart Chapters 1-3 Summary

& Analysis

CHAPTER 1 SUMMARY
Achebe’s novel begins with his central character, Okonkwo, who is “well known
throughout the nine villages” (3). “Twenty years or more” ago, he won a fight
against an undefeated wrestler, Amalinze, which established his honor (3). “Tall
and huge” (3), and “severe” in his face, Okonkwo has “no patience with
unsuccessful men,” especially his father, Unoka (4).

Unoka, as Okonkwo sees him, “was lazy and improvident and was quite incapable
of thinking about tomorrow” (5). Though Unoka had been tall like his son, before he
passed away ten years earlier, he was “very thin and had a slight stoop” (5).
Okonkwo remembers his father playing the flute, drinking palm-wine, and
celebrating the harvest with others in the village. Everyone saw him as “a loafer,”
and “his wife and children had barely enough to eat” (6). He was constantly in debt
to others.

Okoye, a musician friend of Unoka’s, once visited to ask that Unoka return a debt of
two hundred cowries. After Unoka broke a kola nut and prayed to his ancestors for
protection, and after he played his flute to distract from talk of war, and after Okoye
pronounced a series of

Things Fall Apart Chapters 4-6 Summary

& Analysis

CHAPTER 4 SUMMARY

Chapter 4 begins by recounting an episode when Okonkwo is older and “one of the
lords of the clan,” during which he calls another man a “woman” because he
contradicts him (26). The other men see Okonkwo’s insult as overly harsh, and an
elder retorts with a proverb, saying “that those whose palm-kernels were cracked
for them by a benevolent spirit should not forget to be humble” (26). Yet the
narrator explains that everyone can recognize that Okonkwo earns his power
himself, without a “benevolent spirit” to help (27). The clan honors a man “by the
work of his hands,” which is why Okonkwo is chosen to retrieve Ikemefuna (27).

Though Ikemefuna cries often during his first weeks in the village, and though
Okonkwo beats him until he is “ill for three market weeks,” Ikemefuna eventually
settles into the village (28). Okonkwo, though he “never [shows] any emotion
openly,” comes to like Ikemefuna. Nwoye, Okonkwo’s son, admires him because
“he [seems] to know everything” (28). In time, Ikemefuna accompanies Okonkwo to
ceremonies “like a son, carrying his stool and his goatskin bag”; Ikemefuna begins
to call him “father” (28).