Why this book:  Selected by my literature reading group. I had read it before, but wanted to read it again and advocated for it. 

Summary in 3 sentences:  Okonkwo is a prominent leader in an indigenous village in the upper Niger valley in Africa, and we get to know him, his family, the customs and culture of his village.  Various challenges befall him, his family and village and through how they deal with them, we get to know him and the world he lives in.  When English Missionaries arrive to spread the word of Christ and the values of the Church and Mother England, we are witness to the collision between two cultures and systems of values.  

My Impressions: My second time reading it – this is a classic for a number of reasons.  It was first published in 1959 and provides what appears to me to  be an unvarnished, un-romanticized look at an African (Nigerian) indigenous culture before, during, and after contact with clumsy though perhaps well-meaning missionaries.  It is a classic because it is an African perspective on the cultural imperialism that took place throughout the African continent under the guise of Christianization and civilization, but what in the process disrupted and destroyed the social order that had been working more-or-less effectively for generations, perhaps millennia, and caused untold suffering in a heavy-handed paternalistic effort to civilize and “improve” these people. 

The protagonist of the story – both hero and anti-hero – is Okonkwo who we get to know as a child growing up as the son of a ne’er do well in his village, how he overcame that stigma and rose up to be one of the leading men of his village. He would not be seen as virtuous by our Western standards – but he met the standards of his time and place – not a bad man at all, but powerful, a courageous warrior, an ambitious man, who took his obligations to his immediate and extended family and kin and his village seriously..  Okonkwo was hardly an ideal father or husband by our standards – to his multiple wives and many children –  but he was a man of his time and context.  He provided for them, took care of them, and expected complete obedience, which was a cultural norm.  

The first 2/3 of the book is a series of stories and incidents that show his evolution from a young strong hero into an influential, well-respected and powerful leader of his community, with rank and titles,  until due to an accident, he was banished from his community for seven years, as was the custom of his community.  Never one to violate the customs and traditions of his community,  he complied without complaint, and took his family to live in another village, where he did well in farming and as a new member of that community, until he was allowed to return to his own.  At this point he is close to 40 years old.

During the time of his exile, Christian missionaries began proselytizing in the various villages of that part of Nigeria, arguing that people should give up the primitive gods and customs of their ancestors and accept the one Christian God and the values of Western civilization.  Okonkwo and many others in the native community were deeply offended by this presumption of superiority of a white religion and culture,  and were especially angered that some in their community chose to give up their own religion and values and follow those of the white missionaries and their black converts. The tension between the traditional customs, religion and values and those imported by the whites and adopted by many of otherwise disenfranchised from the native community, came to a head, with predictably unpleasant results.

We get to know Okonkwo and some of his wives and children within their own context and as real human beings with whom I could relate, not as cut-out aboriginals playing symbolic roles in this conflict between cultures.  Though many of the customs that they had in their community I found distasteful, eg, twins were considered unnatural and were put out in the forest to die, and women were clearly subservient in a patriarchal society.  But the villages had their own effective means for settling disputes and there was a stability that seemed to work. All that was upset at the forcible imposition of outside values on the community.

The first of the white missionaries was relatively enlightened, as he seemed to respect differences and found compromises between Christian values that seemed to work with the indigenous customs and values.  When he left, he was replaced by an uncompromising, my-way-or-the-highway, us-against-them minister who chose to rule with the heavy-handed authority of the Church and the Queen. That’s when things started falling apart. 

This simple little book is thought provoking and deserves its status as a classic of Western interaction with indigenous African cultures. I recall reading that Things Fall Apart inspired Barbara Kingslover to write The Poisonwood Bible, another great novel about missionaries in Africa, which I’ve read twice. 

Things Fall Apart is part of what is referred to as Achebe’s African Trilogy.  I have not yet read the follow-on book written by Achebe a couple of years later, No Longer at Ease, which features Okonkwo’s grandson.