Yesterday I read the beautifully written and very moving Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Nigerian novelist and poet. The novel tells the story of Okonkwo, a man living within the Igbo tribe in Nigeria and struggling with internal issues of identity and external forces of change as the white man comes to his part of Africa.
Achebe gives us a compelling story in his character of Okonkwo, an everyman in his quest for self-identity and affirmation of self-worth, and in his fear of the future. We meet Okonkwo as a young man ashamed of his father, who is happy-go-lucky but lazy and dies with many debts and few accomplishments. Okonkwo is determined to live his life in the opposite manner from his father, in order to create a new future for himself separate from the identity of his father. He is secretly fearful that his future will become what his father’s past was, impoverished and disdained by others, and so he becomes formidable in strength and resolve, rigorously hard working, and hard-hearted. He never wants to appear weak in any way, as he believes any perceived weakness will make him like his father. This fear of appearing weak to others compels him to react violently whenever a perceived threat to his manliness appears, losing his temper at slight provocations, mercilessly beating one wife for neglecting to cook a meal for him, shooting his gun off when he overhears a snide comment against him, beating his children for minor mistakes, and participating in an oracle-ordered killing even though he has been specifically warned to stay away.
Okonkwo enjoys years of success through his own hard work and bull-headedness. He is materially successful, elevated in his clan to hold title, surrounded by three wives and sons and daughters, and enjoys vigorous strength and health. Nevertheless, his chi (personal god) is not strong enough to continue the luck and good fortune — or is it he himself who fails? — and he becomes plagued by misfortune and unhappiness. When he makes a final stand for himself, and for his clan, the result is heartbreaking. We are not witness to his final act, only its conclusion, but we know it was the lowest depths of despair, and the darkest mood of melancholy and self-doubt, that led him to it.
In addition to being a quiet but powerfully-told story, Things Fall Apartprovides many details of Igbo clan life in Nigeria. The various fascinating aspects of religious, family, and village life were very strongly inter-related and kept clan life stable and ordered. The strict rules and strong traditions of the Igbo guaranteed the relative safety of the clan, its health and peace within, and protected against malevolent forces from without. Rituals governed the sowing and harvesting seasons, and times of rest and peace were dictated by cultural traditions, ensuring an understood and therefore comforting rhythm to life.
When English missionaries arrive, the cultural and spiritual traditions of the Igbo are not of interest to them, other than as a challenge for bringing converts to Christianity. To encourage converts, the missionaries build schools and promise the people that good fortune will come through being educated, and warnings that other men will come and rule over them if they do not know how to read and write: “[f]rom the very beginning religion and education went hand in hand.” The missionaries begin to attract converts, including one of Okonkwo’s own sons who is disgruntled with clan rules, outcasts from the village looking for a better life, and women no longer able to abide under the restrictive and sometimes cruel rules on births (twins were always taken to the bush to die, as they were seen as bad luck) and treatment by husbands.
Inevitably there is a clash between the differing views of religion and justice between the missionaries and the English government that supports them, and the Igbo clans. Africans from other parts of Nigeria are the guards of the White government and deal harshly with the Igbo. Retaliation by the village results in further clashes between clan ways and White ways. When White Man justice is meted out, it is a horror to the Igbo and just one more blow — the beginning of the death knell – in the White Man’s unevenly weighted battle against the clans. Achebe has his White missionary describe his work as the “Pacification of the Primitive tribes of the lower Niger”: pacification meaning subjugation, and primitive meaning misunderstood. Through Achebe’s novel, we do understand the Igbo culture, and we mourn the realization of Okonkwo’s most profound fears: that he will not be strong enough to prevent the future from coming.
