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Introduction

Sometime in 1957, an advertisement appeared in the Spectator. The advertiser promised that, for a fee, ‘Authors’ Manuscripts [would be] Typed’. Several thousand miles away in Lagos, the bustling, seaside capital city of the soon-to-be independent British West African colony of Nigeria, an aspiring writer who happened to require the services of a typist came across the advertisement and promptly sent off his manuscript to England. The manuscript, named from a poem by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, was entitled Things Fall Apart. Its author, the twenty-seven-year-old Chinua Achebe, was a producer with the Nigerian Broadcasting Service. For two years he had occupied his nights and his every free moment with the task of writing, and rigorously editing, the manuscript. It was a staggeringly ambitious work of invocation that was at once a celebration and an interrogation of the mores and culture of the South-eastern Igbo peoples, from whom Achebe descended, and an eloquent rebuttal of the all too casual denigration of Africans by, among others, European writers such as Joseph Conrad (whose quip, about the Congo setting of Heart of Darkness, that he was merely poking around in ‘the dead cats of civilization’ has come to define Africa in the western imagination).

For several months after posting his handwritten manuscript for typing, Achebe heard nothing from England. His polite but firm letters to the London address elicited no response. He was close to despair, convinced that it was lost. And it almost was lost but for the intervention of a friend, a British colleague at the Nigerian Broadcasting Service, who during her annual holiday in England took the time to track down the firm of typists. She returned to Nigeria with a typed copy of the manuscript. A year later, in 1958, William Heinemann published Things Fall Apart, the first title in what became the African Writers Series. The book received instant acclaim. It has since sold over ten million copies and has been translated into forty-five languages.

Chinua Achebe was born on 16 November 1930, in Ogidi, Eastern Nigeria. His great uncle, who brought up Achebe’s father, had taken the ‘highest-but-one title’ in the clan, and was considered to be of such importance that when in the late nineteenth century Anglican missionaries came to Ogidi, and sought support for their work, they were shown to his compound. ‘For a short while he allowed them to operate from his compound,’ Achebe says in an essay written nearly a century later, ‘but after a few days he sent them packing again.’ Not because he found their theology offensive, but because he found their music alarming. ‘Your music is too sad to come from a man’s house,’ Achebe’s great uncle told the missionaries, ‘my neighbours might think it was my funeral dirge.’ Achebe’s father on the other hand had no such reservations about the new creed. He joined the missionaries, received an education from them, and became, in 1904, a teacher and catechist for the Anglican Church. Achebe grew up in a home where they sang hymns and read the Bible night and day. But he would often sneak across to his ‘heathen’ uncle’s compound and partake in pagan festival’s of rice and stew. To his delight, he found in the food no flavour of idolatry. The converts to the new creed looked down on the non-Christians in the village, calling them ‘the people of nothing’. But Achebe did not suffer from an identity crisis over the two cultures contesting for his devotion. He lived at the crossroads of culture and although, as he grew up, he knew to reject, ‘all that rubbish [about] the evil forces and irrational passions prowling through Africa’s heart of darkness’, he felt also that the crossroads did have a certain dangerous potency, ‘because a man might perish there wrestling with multiple-headed spirits, but also he might be lucky and return to his people with the boon of prophetic vision’.

In 1953, at the age of twenty-three Achebe took a degree in English from the prestigious University College, Ibadan, becoming by definition a member of the select élite of educated West Africans who came into adulthood in the 1950s, and who were destined by history to inherit from the colonial powers the task of running the independent nation-states that came into being during the post-Second World War implosion of the empire ‘where the sun never sets’. It was a highly educated generation, high achieving and boundless in its aspirations. Its confidence was an embodiment of the all-encompassing spirit of optimism that swept across Africa from desert to coast as emancipation approached. In the wake of the ‘Hitler War’, Britain and France had found the task of rebuilding themselves impossible to reconcile with the bedevilled logistics of running empires of continually hostile and endlessly subversive subjects who clamoured for and were in many instances willing to die for – independence.

But the new dawn into which Achebe’s generation woke was brief, a conjurer’s trick. Even as independence approached, the African states which Winston Churchill had characterized as being nothing but ‘a mere geographical expression’ were still afflicted with the debilitating psychosis of their nineteenth-century birth at the Berlin conference hosted by Bismarck. Here they were arbitrarily conjured into existence by an alliance of expansionist European powers who had come together to stake their claims to the treasure trove known as Africa, which they considered theirs to share, and to negotiate the ground rules for sharing it. They had gathered to partition ‘the Dark Continent’. Thus began the so-called ‘scramble for Africa’, the age of empire. In partitioning Africa, they replaced the cartographer’s terra incognita with a map in which ancient foes were Balkanized and forced to live cheek-by-jowl, and whole nations were atomized and divided into states defined no longer by their shared culture, their common heritage, but by the European flags which now held sway over them. Bismarck’s conference invented the topography of simmering hatred that would be later utilized by his African clones, that perennial infestation of little tyrants and tin-pot megalomaniacs spread all over Africa propagating internecine bloodbaths whose purpose is, and always has been, not only to unearth and annihilate all manifestations of dissent, but to divide and plunder.

Even as Kwame Nkrumah in the Gold Coast, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Mrs Funmilayo Ransome Kuti in Nigeria and many others all over the continent dared to stare the conqueror in the eye and demand total and unconditional sovereignty, the trauma of the transatlantic slave trade, the sheer physical and psychological depredation visited on the continent by this malign enterprise (in which many African rulers had been far from unwilling accomplices), still resonated across the continent. In 1957 the Gold Coast became Ghana, and the Congolese got ready to take to the streets to the infectious melody of ‘Independence cha-cha’, and the Mau-Mau paid with their blood and bought Uhuru. But already the latent demons of unresolved grievances and mutual distrust, liminal and barely suppressed, among those who had up until then tacitly agreed to bury the hatchet (occasionally in the head of the common enemy!) had begun to re-emerge from the collective psyche and riddle the continent with a pathology of rabid, unabated paranoia.

Africa was rid of the conquistador. Freedom and its boat had arrived. And out of the freedom boat, almost imperceptible, just behind – some would say hand in hand with freedom itself, stepped memory, the vengeful, unforgiving brigand of all time. ‘It is the storyteller,’ Achebe has said, ‘who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have – otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.’ Memory heals, it regenerates. It is an affirming god, a transcendent guide in the ritual of continuity. But when spurned, when repressed, memory mutates into a trickster imp and seduces the wayfarer to the precipice and beyond.

It was against this backdrop of unfettered optimism on the one hand, and looming despair on the other, that the precocious and introspective twenty-five-year-old Chinua Achebe sat down in 1955 to write Things Fall Apart. Achebe was by no means the only novelist to emerge from West Africa in the ’50s. Mongo Beti, Camara Laye and Ferdinand Oyono had announced their presence in the Francophone world. In 1954, Achebe’s compatriot Cyprian Ekwensi, who became Achebe’s colleague at the Nigerian Broadcasting Service three years later, had published People of the City, a novel of manners about the rites of passage of a journalist and bandleader in a young African country not dissimilar to Nigeria. People of the City was widely regarded as the first major novel in English by a West African author. Ekwensi was a great storyteller, middlebrow in aesthetic sensibility, unrivalled when it came to light, which is not to say low, entertainment. Two years before Ekwensi’s debut, Faber had published another Nigerian author, Amos Tutuola, a messenger in the Labour Department of the colonial government. Tutuola’s novel, which he called The Palm-wine Drinkard, opens with these lines: ‘I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life. In those days we did not know other money, except COWRIES [sic], so that everything was very cheap, and my father was the richest man in our town.’

Tutuola was a folklorist. He borrowed largely from Yoruba and Christian mythology, and rendered in English themes and fables that the writer D. O. Fagunwa (1903–63), who wrote in Yoruba, had contemporaneously explored. Tutuola wrote in his own self-invented dialect of English, a catch-as-catch-can lexicon articulated in an angular syntax anchored in prodigious inventiveness. It was a humble triumph of the imagination over the limitations of language, a sin which happened to be his virtue: he simply wrote as best he could.

But neither Ekwensi’s People of the City, nor Tutuola’s The Palm-wine Drinkard prepared the world for Chinua Achebe’s powerful, elegiac Things Fall Apart. Achebe, the debut-writer, arrives on the arena fully formed. From the first page to the last, there is not a misguided step, not the hint of a flustered cue in this deceptively simple masterwork of sublime understatement.

Reader, beware: Things Fall Apart is savage and tender; it blisters with wit and radiates with the inner glow of hard-earned compassion. It is disillusioned but passionately engaged, solemn while being exuberant; it is polemical but wise. There is not a shred of the congealed violence of cheap sentimentality: Achebe’s characters do not seek our permission to be human, they do not apologise for being complex (or for being African, or for being human, or for being so extraordinarily alive).

The novel opens with perhaps the most celebrated, certainly the most famous opening paragraph in the history of African literature:

Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honour to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat. Amalinze was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten, from Umuofia to Mbaino. He was called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.

The story of Okonkwo begins twenty years after that fabled encounter with Amalinze the Cat. Okonkwo is now, at thirty-eight, a titled man, and a living legend in the clan of nine villages of which Umuofia, a village in the hinterlands of the Igbo nation, is a stellar member. Okonkwo has three wives, eight children, and two barns. He is a renowned warrior, he has five human heads hanging on the walls of his hut to attest to his bravery. Even by the high standards of Umuofia and the clan, Okonkwo is truly an unusual man. Every child in the land knows the details of Okonkwo’s humble origins, they have heard about his father, Unoka, a lazy, improvident man who could not feed his own family. They know that Okonkwo, at the start of his career as a farmer, had been a sharecropper. Their parents shudder when they remember the year Okonkwo the sharecropper borrowed eight hundred yams from the wealthiest man in the land. It had been the worst year in living memory: ‘nothing happened at its proper time; it was either too early or too late. It seemed as if the world had gone mad. The rains were late, and, when they came, lasted only a brief moment. The blazing sun returned, more fierce than it had ever been known, and scorched all the green that had appeared with the rains. The earth burned like hot coals and roasted all the yams that had been sown … that year the harvest was like a funeral … one man tied his cloth to a tree branch and hanged himself’. Yet Okonkwo survived it and went on to become ‘one of the greatest men of his time. Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings. Okonkwo had clearly washed his hands and so he ate with kings and elders’.

The Berlin conference took place in 1884–5. Okonkwo was born a few years later, in the mid-nineteenth century, in the Igbo village of Umnofia, in what is now south-eastern Nigeria. He grew up in a patient and tolerant, conservative yet flexible and accommodating society whose ‘Oracle never sends it out to do battle in an unjust cause’. Okonkwo, its most revered son, has a will that stands in stark contrast to the forbearing nature of his society. He is headstrong and inflexible, short-tempered and uncompromising. Yet Umuofia venerates him. The nine villages idolize him. Okonkwo is a maverick in a libertarian society. It is this potent brew that, ironically, unravels the clan, and fells Okonkwo, when the white man comes calling.

Biyi Bandele

London, 2001

Chapter One

Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honour to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat. Amalinze was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten, from Umuofia to Mbaino. He was called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.

The drums beat and the flutes sang and the spectators held their breath. Amalinze was a wily craftsman, but Okonkwo was as slippery as a fish in water. Every nerve and every muscle stood out on their arms, on their backs and their thighs, and one almost heard them stretching to breaking point. In the end Okonkwo threw the Cat.

That was many years ago, twenty years or more, and during this time Okonkwo’s fame had grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan. He was tall and huge, and his bushy eyebrows and wide nose gave him a very severe look. He breathed heavily, and it was said that, when he slept, his wives and children in their out-houses could hear him breathe. When he walked, his heels hardly touched the ground and he seemed to walk on springs, as if he was going to pounce on somebody. And he did pounce on people quite often. He had a slight stammer and whenever he was angry and could not get his words out quickly enough, he would use his fists. He had no patience with unsuccessful men. He had had no patience with his father.

Unoka, for that was his father’s name, had died ten years ago. In his day he was lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow. If any money came his way, and it seldom did, he immediately bought gourds of palm-wine, called round his neighbours and made merry. He always said that whenever he saw a dead man’s mouth he saw the folly of not eating what one had in one’s lifetime. Unoka was, of course, a debtor, and he owed every neighbour some money, from a few cowries to quite substantial amounts.

He was tall but very thin and had a slight stoop. He wore a haggard and mournful look except when he was drinking or playing on his flute. He was very good on his flute, and his happiest moments were the two or three moons after the harvest when the village musicians brought down their instruments, hung above the fireplace. Unoka would play with them, his face beaming with blessedness and peace. Sometimes another village would ask Unoka’s band and their dancing egwugwu to come and stay with them and teach them their tunes. They would go to such hosts for as long as three or four markets, making music and feasting. Unoka loved the good fare and the good fellowship, and he loved this season of the year, when the rains had stopped and the sun rose every morning with dazzling beauty. And it was not too hot either, because the cold and dry harmattan wind was blowing down from the north. Some years the harmattan was very severe and a dense haze hung on the atmosphere. Old men and children would then sit round log fires, warming their bodies. Unoka loved it all, and he loved the first kites that returned with the dry season, and the children who sang songs of welcome to them. He would remember his own childhood, how he had often wandered around looking for a kite sailing leisurely against the blue sky. As soon as he found one he would sing with his whole being, welcoming it back from its long, long journey, and asking it if it had brought home any lengths of cloth.

That was years ago, when he was young. Unoka, the grown-up, was a failure. He was poor and his wife and children had barely enough to eat. People laughed at him because he was a loafer, and they swore never to lend him any more money because he never paid back. But Unoka was such a man that he always succeeded in borrowing more, and piling up his debts.

One day a neighbour called Okoye came in to see him. He was reclining on a mud bed in his hut playing on the flute. He immediately rose and shook hands with Okoye, who then unrolled the goatskin which he carried under his arm, and sat down. Unoka went into an inner room and soon returned with a small wooden disc containing a kola nut, some alligator pepper and a lump of white chalk.

‘I have kola,’ he announced when he sat down, and passed the disc over to his guest.

‘Thank you. He who brings kola brings life. But I think you ought to break it,’ replied Okoye passing back the disc.

‘No, it is for you, I think,’ and they argued like this for a few moments before Unoka accepted the honour of breaking the kola. Okoye, meanwhile, took the lump of chalk, drew some lines on the floor, and then painted his big toe. As he broke the kola, Unoka prayed to their ancestors for life and health, and for protection against their enemies. When they had eaten they talked about many things: about the heavy rains which were drowning the yams, about the next ancestral feast and about the impending war with the village of Mbaino. Unoka was never happy when it came to wars. He was in fact a coward and could not bear the sight of blood. And so he changed the subject and talked about music, and his face beamed. He could hear in his mind’s ear the blood-stirring and intricate rhythms of the ekwe and the udu and the ogene, and he could hear his own flute weaving in and out of them, decorating them with a colourful and plaintive tune. The total effect was gay and brisk, but if one picked out the flute as it went up and down and then broke up into short snatches, one saw that there was sorrow and grief there.

Okoye was also a musician. He played on the ogene. But he was not a failure like Unoka. He had a large barn full of yams and he had three wives. And now he was going to take the Idemili title, the third highest in the land. It was a very expensive ceremony and he was gathering all his resources together. That was in fact the reason why he had come to see Unoka. He cleared his throat and began:

‘Thank you for the kola. You may have heard of the title I intend to take shortly.’

Having spoken plainly so far, Okoye said the next half a dozen sentences in proverbs. Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten. Okoye was a great talker and he spoke for a long time, skirting round the subject and then hitting it finally. In short, he was asking Unoka to return the two hundred cowries he had borrowed from him more than two years before. As soon as Unoka understood what his friend was driving at, he burst out laughing. He laughed loud and long and his voice rang out clear as the ogene, and tears stood in his eyes. His visitor was amazed, and sat speechless. At the end, Unoka was able to give an answer between fresh outbursts of mirth.

‘Look at that wall,’ he said, pointing at the far wall of his hut, which was rubbed with red earth so that it shone. ‘Look at those lines of chalk;’ and Okoye saw groups of short perpendicular lines drawn in chalk. There were five groups, and the smallest group had ten lines. Unoka had a sense of the dramatic and so he allowed a pause, in which he took a pinch of snuff and sneezed noisily, and then he continued: ‘Each group there represents a debt to someone, and each stroke is one hundred cowries. You see, I owe that man a thousand cowries. But he has not come to wake me up in the morning for it. I shall pay you, but not today. Our elders say that the sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them. I shall pay my big debts first.’ And he took another pinch of snuff, as if that was paying the big debts first. Okoye rolled his goatskin and departed.

When Unoka died he had taken no title at all and he was heavily in debt. Any wonder then that his son Okonkwo was ashamed of him? Fortunately, among these people a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father. Okonkwo was clearly cut out for great things. He was still young but he had won fame as the greatest wrestler in the nine villages. He was a wealthy farmer and had two barns full of yams, and had just married his third wife. To crown it all he had taken two titles and had shown incredible prowess in two inter-tribal wars. And so although Okonkwo was still young, he was already one of the greatest men of his time. Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings. Okonkwo had clearly washed his hands and so he ate with kings and elders. And that was how he came to look after the doomed lad who was sacrificed to the village of Umuofia by their neighbours to avoid war and bloodshed. The ill-fated lad was called Ikemefuna.

Chinua Achebe

THINGS FALL APART

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Contents

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THINGS FALL APART

Introduction

Things Fall Apart

Part One

Chapter One