Things Fall Apart is the story of Okonkwo, a man of the Ibo tribe in Nigeria in the 1890s. He spends his life wrestling with how to be more manly, while various circumstances and agents try to thwart his quest. What does it look like to be a man in Ibo culture? What happens when the missionaries arrive?

Kwame Anthony Appiah claims that this “may well be Africa’s best-loved novel. It is read widely in Nigeria, where it is written, and in the rest of Africa, where it is a staple in secondary-school English classes and at the university” (ix). It’s easy to see why. The novel is written in episodic form with short chapters narrating specific incidents that swarm together to tell the overarching story. When you read Things Fall Apart, you feel like you have been transported to pre-colonial Nigeria.

Part way through the story, missionaries arrive. I was fascinated by the way in which Achebe portrayed them. At the beginning, they made me proud to be a Christian in the way they welcomed outcasts from the Ibo tribe. Of course, this upset the balance and changed life forever.

Another reflection, from a Christian perspective, was the destructive alliance between church and state. When the church became a tool for the purpose of colonial expansion, the missionaries lost their own identity even as they tore the Ibo identity away.

Things Fall Apart is a deeply nuanced story that has well earned it’s position in Everyman’s Library!

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.