Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe - Episode 1 - Meet Nigeria's Most Famous Author , Teacher and Philosopher!
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe - Episode 1 - Meet Nigeria's Most Famous Author , Teacher and Philosopher!
Hi, I’m Christy Shriver and we’re here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us.
And I’m Garry Shriver, and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast. I am very excited this series on Nigerian author Chinua Achebe and his first groundbreaking book- Things Fall Apart first published in 1958. There are not many books that have had the kind of positive worldwide impact that this book has had, and the reasons are numerous.
The reasons are numerous. I first met Dr. Achebe’s work late as an adult. I was teaching English at Bolton High School here in Memphis, and we had just started the IB program or the International Baccalaureate program, a college prep curriculum acknowledged around the world. In the IB program students must read works from English language writers from around the entire English speaking world, not just from the UK or the US which is what had been traditional for me up to that point in my education even as a teacher. His was the first book I read from an African writer, and it was impactful for so many reasons, some personal, others academic. I became like many readers of his work, all of a sudden aware of new way of thinking about Africa or aware of a way I had perhaps thought about Africa, albeit completely unawares. I have mentioned before that my parents were missionaries and I was raised mostly in Brazil, but for a time we lived in Zimbabwe, Africa. My time in Zimbabwe was my first experience with the continent of Africa. My time in Africa had made a strong impression on me. We lived in a missionary compound in what they called back then “the bush” which means we didn’t live in a village or a town; we just lived in the interior. I had never seen a place like the interior of Zimbabwe. We lived about 30 minutes away from the town of Gweru. The first essay I wrote in college was called, “The African Sunset” and it was about how overwhelming just the physical landscape was. As a 13 year old girl, I would run down the twin-stripped back road for a couple of miles every day. I still remember many times on my way home, I would look out across the Savannah and just stare at the beautiful sky- the many colors against the savannah. Since those days, I’ve always loved Africa.
But Christy, Nigeria is not Zimbabwe nor located anywhere near it on the African continent- correct?
That is absolutely correct- and what a horrible misconception for people that think of Africa as one place- nothing could be farther from the truth. And you are also absolutely correct in assuming that the landscapes of Zimbabwe are NOT the landscapes of Nigeria- just as the landscapes of Tennessee are not the landscapes of Florida or Minnesota. There are 54 independent countries in Africa. Compare that to North America where we only have 23. Nigeria is in West Africa- it is farther north as well- although you have to remember- much Africa is in the Southern Hemisphere. Nigeria is in the Northern hemisphere, like the United States of Europe, but Zimbabwe is in the Southern Hemisphere- it’s also farther away from the equator than Nigeria so it has a much more moderate climate than Nigeria.
Another big difference is that Nigeria is on the coast while Zimbabwe is totally landlocked.
Exactly, if you think of Africa like an upside down capital L, think of Nigeria at the bend next to the Atlantic ocean, where as Zimbabwe is way down at the bottom- the second country to the bottom from South Africa. They are far from each other, but I will say Nigeria, like Zimbabwe has savannahs with all of the amazing wildlife like elephants, hippopotamuses, crocodiles and cheetahs!! Nigeria just has more variety of climates than Zimbabwe does including a tropical forest that has gorillas.
Another difference from our reality here in North America and an even more complex reality than climate and biodiversity is language. While the majority of people in North America speak either English, French or Spanish as their first and heart language. That is not the case in Africa. In Africa, there are more than 2000 distinct languages. Africa has a third of the world’s languages with less than a seventh of the world’s population. Of course Arabic is the most widely spoken language in Africa, but after Arabic, English is the second most widely spoken language.
However, what we need to understand is that English is often not a person’s first language. Many times African students will learn one language at home as in the case of Achebe, that would be Igbo, but English is the language of school and commerce- it’s what we call a trade language. It is not the language of indigenous stories, of traditional music, of the people.
An important point, English has become a trade language for a lot of the world. Even though over 1.5 billion people on planet earth speak English, only 400 million speak it as a first language.
That’s why, even in Brazil, where I grew up, most students will study English as a second language as early as elementary school because most international business will be conducted in English. It’s also why when Achebe first chose to write his books in English instead of Ibgo there was push back. Was his choice to write in English a betrayal? You could see it that way, but that’s not now he looked at it. He wanted to his book to be for the world, and so it had to be in a global language.
Well, it certainly accomplished that goal, but the diversity of cultures undoubted has created unique challenges for the continent of Africa as well as a richness of cultural thought and perspective- all of which can be seen specifically in the history and culture of Nigeria.
True, but before we leave my personal experiences I wanted to bring up one other thing about my life; I told you I had lived in Zimbabwe as a child, but I also wanted to mention that my mother was a missionary to Nigeria early in the life of the of the country. Nigeria became independent in 1960. My mother was an elementary school teacher there in 1968. When I read Things Fall Apart, although it takes place much earlier, Achebe references clashes with the missionaries and their portrayal is not necessarily. At first I didn’t like that because it felt he was personally aggressing my mother- judging and condemning her. Her little school was also in the bush outside a town called Oshogbo. From my perspective as a child of a missionary, I knew that my mother had no desire to gain financially from the people she served. She did not view herself as a colonizer. She loved the people. The missionaries in her mission learned the local languages. They had a hospital where they provided medicines and much needed services to local people. My initial gut reaction was to oppose Achebe’s portrayal to say- you’ve got my mother all wrong. But, of course, that is not Achebe’s way-and he makes it hard to argue with him. His own grandfather was an orphan saved by missionaries, so he understands that reality. But he also saw his people- beyond the physical loss of patrimony- lose their confidence and culture. He saw his people see themselves as inferior through financial coercion of Westerners- not just missionaries, but missionaries cannot be excluded from this group. Some of it not indirectly linked to hierarchies and exclusions of people within his own Igbo system- something he illustrates in the book. Achebe leads readers to understand things are not simple. It is also not about any one person. It is not even about anyone being a good person or being a bad person. It’s not about any one group of people. He is not out to villainize the person of my mother. He’s not out to glamorize the character of Okonkwo. He wants to tell the story of his people told from his point of view- a point of view from within. The story of Nigeria, like the story of humanity is messy. It is a human story. And the more I read the speeches and non-fiction writings of Achebe as well as the many who have come after him, the more I realize it is humanity that Achebe seeks to express above all else- something I want to get into in a different episode when we talk about his writings on Joseph Conrad.
And It’s an important story for the world to understand. The book is more relevant today than it was when he wrote it because technology is shrinking the world but it still has many different languages, worldviews, religions, and value systems. Also, we are more aware than ever of the tragedies and aggressive nature of human history. The book seems to resonate because he addresses where on a worldwide scale, and has an informed central vision on how we should proceed forward if something close to peace and mutual respect are ever going to exist.
I think that is why when Achebe finally succeeded in publishing his book (it literally took something of a miracle), it became an instant success- selling millions and has since been translated in over 50 languages worldwide. There is something universal in all of his writings that resonates intuitively in the heart of every person who reads it even though the Igbo culture is new and maybe even mysterious. Things Fall Apart was the first book written by an African to be introduced into the English curriculum -even on the continent of Africa.
Since my initial introduction, I have watched him lecture on many YouTube videos. His persona later in life reminds me of Elie Wiesel’s in many ways. Like Wiesel, he was a soft-spoken man. He exuded kindness, gentleness and wisdom- after many years of war and conflict in his country, he understood peace and purpose in a special way- in fact, listening to him lecture in some ways reduces some of the world’s most complicated problems to a resolvable hope found in humility and forgiveness.
And that is the legacy of the entire story of Nigeria- where we must start as we give context to the book Things Fall Apart and to the life of Achebe. American historian John Patton says and I quote, “Nigeria must be the most complicated country in the world.” And I don’t know if anyone tries to argue differently. There are 520 different languages spoken there. There are 100 different ethnic groups. Nigeria is the ONLY country in the world whose population is split 50/50 equally between Muslims and Christians- neither has a clear majority. Those facts alone create challenges unparalleled anywhere else on earth. But beyond that, we must not overlook the incredibly tectonic impact of the British empire as it altered and changed the lives of the millions living not just in Nigeria but all of Africa.
Hence- Things Fall Apart- Achebe was not the first writer to write about Africa, but he was one of the first to publish in English from an African perspective- and his voice was an important one.
As we’ve mentioned many times before, history is recorded by those who write it down, and in West Africa, where Nigeria is located, history had been written primarily by the British soldiers themselves. And so, of course, this perspective was always skewed leaving out the perspective of the indigenous people.
Isn’t that always the case?
Well, pretty much, but not always. In India for example, the atrocities of colonialism were much better recorded by Indian nationals, and so they have a higher profile and we have much more knowledge of what happened in India as opposed to the things that happened in West Africa, for example.
Well, the story Things Fall Apart takes place sometime during the final decade of the 1900s in a little village of the Igbo people. What do we need to know to get to that place? Tell us about Europe’s interaction with that area as well as the people themselves.
Well, that’s a very tall order. But let’s start with the make up of the land itself. So, Nigeria really is culturally divided- today 50% of it is Muslim, 50% of it is Christian. There is a reason for this and it very much has to do with Europe. The African slave trade started early- 1500s even. But Europeans did not really go into the continent. They only went to the coast and bought slaves. The Africans didn’t want them in the continent so they fought them out but also, Europeans strangely kept dying when they went into the interior. For centuries they assumed it was the climate; that the heat was killing them. But in fact, it was malaria, a disease you get from a mosquito- they just didn’t know that in the 19th century. In 1808 , Britain abolished slavery, notice that’s almost 60 years before the United States, but Britain still wanted African resources- in Nigeria’s case back then it was palm oil. Today, Nigeria’s largest revenue source is its oil, but that wouldn’t be discovered until the 1950s. Anyway, after the abolition of slavery the relationship between Britain and Nigeria went from extracting people from the continent to its natural resources and this was still done through mercantilism- today what we understand as mercantile colonization. Still, it was still physically difficult for the British to go themselves into the continent. This all changed when two technologies emerged- one was the steam boat, and the other was quinine. Quinine was a medicine that treats malaria. This changed the reality. And the British companies began to colonize the land- why pay and compete for resources when you can just go take them for yourself essentially is the idea. In Nigeria’s case, this dirty work was done by a company called the British Niger Company today known today as Unilever. The story of what happened there is too much to get into here, but it’s bloody and crooked, as you might imagine. The. British didn’t actually revoke the charter of the British Niger Company until the year 1900- this is the year that the British Government actually began to openly colonize Nigeria- this is the outside context where we drop the book.
What about the part of Nigeria where Okonkwo lived specifically.
Okonkwo’s village is an Igbo village. Now we must remember that Nigeria is not just one place, and the Nigerian people are not just one people. The easiest way perhaps for us to understand this in the Americas is to think of the indigenous people on the American continent. The Cherokee are not the Arrapaho who are not the Sioux who are not the Iroquois who are not the Hawaiian- every nation has its own unique culture, a language, a way of life. Some nations are warriors; some are farmers. In the case of Nigeria, the Northern nations were Muslim and highly organized. They were ruled by Emir’s and these were connected. When the British colonized Northern Nigeria they asserted indirect control- an easier and less-messy way to colonize. They controlled the Emir, the emir controlled the people- so the average person was not as aware of the arrangement. Local people had less contact with white Europeans. In the South, that was not the reality- especially with the Igbo people;. The Igbo people historically were very democratic by tradition. There is a famous saying, “The Igbo knows no king”. They believed strongly that every free born person had a right to have a say in the running of his society. The British had a much more difficult time subduing a nation with this kind of de-centralized structure. Also, as we see in the book, the Igbo as well as the other Southern tribes were animistic. They had many gods, not unlike the Hawaiians we talked about last week. We see that in Things Fall Apart as well. I know we’re going to talk about the religion in another episode as well as the relationship with missionaries, but I want say- this was a problem for the British. There were millions of people all speaking different languages, 500 to be exact, they had no central government and no common religion. So, the British came in as teachers, both secular and religious. And in teaching English and Christianity they were successful. The two most important legacies today of the British are the English language and the Christian religion. And here is one of life’s interesting ironies- today there are more people that speak English in Nigeria than speak English in Britain. Also, there are more Christians in Nigeria than in Britain and even more surprisingly, Nigeria sends out more Christian missionaries around the world than almost any other nation, in spite of its financial challenges. The largest Evangelical church in Europe is a Nigerian church.
Things Fall Apart is the beginning of this colonial period. Some European books make it sound like it was a mostly peaceful thing, and the British were well-received.
Yes- that would be the soldiers accounts. But that is absolutely NOT the case. It was bloody and intensely violent. Whole villages in some cases were wiped out- every person murdered, every structure burned and even every tree flattened. After the initial war of conquest, there was a secondary wave of indigenous people fighting back called the Ekumeku movement. This means the silent ones. They went around at night as guerilla warriors starting in the early 1800s with the Royal Niger Company all the way through 1915. Also, I might add, often the British would hire warrior nations of the North to come down and subdue Southern nations. So, you can see this does not unite a people in any way. It also breeds a culture of corruption. There should be little wonder that six years after Nigeria won its independence from the British it plunged into a bloody civil war that cost the Igbo alone 3 million lives.
Well, although that’s not the context of this book, Achebe has other books that express that continuing story using fiction as the tool of language, but he even wrote a personal memory about the civil war years called There was a Country.
Yes and worth reading. Let me just add this one thing before we leave the history side of things, although Nigeria has many challenges, some natural, some imported from the colonial experience, it is important to note that the Nigerian story today is in some ways a qualified success and something the world should pay attention to. By the end of the century there will be ¾ of a billion Nigerians. Today 2/3 of the population is under thirty. It is a young country in every way. The people there are as different as you can imagine, but they do share one belief- they have a desire to preserve their country. They know they did not create their own borders, but today those borders are sacrosanct. They know they have cultural and religious differences that have caused more violence than we can ever understand in the West, but today they have innovations to cope with these problems- a federal affirmative action system for example to ensure that no ethnic group is favored above other groups and a presidency that must alternate between one being a Christian to the next being a Muslim and back and forth. All of these are aimed at forming peace and keeping it. So, we must respect and understand the history we are reading, but also the promise of the Nigerian Project which the country has purchased at so high a price.
So, going back in time, not to the story but to Achebe’s life; he was born in 1930. His parents, and this should make more sense now, were deeply Christian and raised Achebe as a Christian. In fact his first name was a British name, Albert- Albert Chinualumogwu Achebe- we’ll talk more about that next week. He read the Bible daily; attended church services, all the things Christian children do. However, he was also very much interested in his Igbo tradition and that included religion. His little village, as a child, was half Christian and half traditional in their beliefs. Achebe’s father, a Christian minister, ensured that his son attended English and Anglican schools, but the village life was all around him. He enjoyed traditional festivals and heard all of the tales and stories of the Igbo. His mother, although a Christian, told him many stories, proverbs and traditions that had been handed down through the oral tradition. So, Achebe grew up a child of two worlds- an Igbo world and the colonial world. Because he was such an incredibly bright student, he was identified as a student capable of working for the British empire and received scholarships to attend the prestigious University College (now the University of Ibadan) as a medical student. He hated studying medicine, and instead changed his course of study to English literature. That was no small decision because it caused him to lose all of his scholarships. For that degree he and his family had to pay out of pocket. It was during those years that he started to write. One of the biggest influence on Achebe’s writing career was his reading of Joseph Conrad’s famous novel about Africa- Heart of Darkness. He had read it even as a child. "Conrad was a seductive writer. He could pull his reader into the fray. And if it were not for what he said about me and my people, I would probably be thinking only of that seduction,"
Today we would find Conrad’s portrayal of any group of people alarmingly offensive.
Of course we would, and Achebe realized it immediately because they were talking about HIM, his family, his people. "The language of description of the people in Heart of Darkness is inappropriate," says Achebe. "I realized how terribly terribly wrong it was to portray my people — any people — from that attitude."
Well, his reaction is a model for all of us. He recognized a bad idea- and he fought it by countering with a better one. He chose to write and publish his own story- the story of his people from his perspective.
Exactly, years later, he was asked if he thought Conrad’s book should be banned. He was emphatic that the answer was no. And amazingly, today a lot of English teachers teach both books together.
I love that- don’t shut someone up by force- just have a superior idea.
And his superior idea changed the course of not just his life but the trajectory of African literature for all time. Achebe received over 30 honorary degrees during his life time. Published political essays, novels, poetry and short stories. He published Things Fall Apart in 1958 at the age of 27. He’d worked on it for a long time. He wrote it out by hand and sent his only copy to a typesetter in England who just sat on it. It almost got lost. He has said, if it had, he likely would have never written anything again, but a friend who lived in England got that worked out. 2000 copies were published and the rest is history. I do want to say, he married a girl named Christiana, but they called her Christy. They were married over 50 years all the way to the time of his death in 2013.
I want point out in 1999 Things Fall Apart inspired and was the title for the fourth studio album by American hip hop band The Roots- and that album went platinum which means it sold over 1 million copies.
I think we can safely say, Achebe had a better idea. Are we ready to start it..
Sure. Let’s do it.
Things Fall Apart the book starts with an epigraph from a poem by W. B Yeats. Yeats is a Nobel Prize winning Irish writer. The poem Achebe quotes was published in 1920- one year after the end of WW1. The name of the poem ironically is “The Second Coming”. As we know from Eliot and many others, this War was supposed to be the war to end all wars but really it murdered millions and created despair in Europe like nothing that had come before it.
Yeat’s first stanza starts with these famous first four lines that contain the title of Achebe’s book. Let me read the first stanza of Yeats poem:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
The epigraph to Achebe’s book is the first four lines. In its own right it is easily one of the most famous and frequently quoted poems in all of Western literature. The context in Yeats mind was the realization that basically European society had pretty much broken down. While some people were optimistic about the future, Yeats wasn’t. He thought the deconstruction of society had left his world in a terribly vulnerable place. His poem is a terrifying prediction of future violence. Of course, from our vantage point we know Yeats was absolutely right and Hitler was right around the corner.
Achebe uses these lines as an epigraph to his book. An epigraph is a short quotation at the beginning of the book. By using lines from “The Second Coming” as the introduction to his book, Achebe makes parallel between what the Europeans had done in WW1 and what the British had done in Igboland- as European had de-structured Europe and left it devastated, European colonization of Africa had done the same thing.
What’s brilliant about that is that Achebe uses the language of the colonizer (literally and figuratively) to enlighten the European heirs of colonialism on the point of view of the people who had been colonized.
Exactly, and it’s worth looking at the poem more closely which we’ll do in our poetry supplement, but it is a brilliant parallel. The specifics of the poem are also incredibly relevant to Things Fall Apart. The poem begins with the image of a falcon flying out of earshot of its human master. In medieval times, people would use falcons or hawks to track down animals at ground level. In actual falconry, the bird is not supposed to keep flying in circles forever; it is eventually supposed to come back and land on the falconer’s glove. In this image, however, the falcon has gotten itself lost by flying too far away, which we can read as a reference to the collapse of traditional social arrangements in Europe at the time Yeats was writing- and is how Achebe sees what has happend to the Igbo social and religious structure that had supported his society for hundreds of years. Yeats will make the argument in his poem that living as Europe was living to use his words, “the center cannot hold” which is exactly the point Achebe is making in Things Fall Apart.. As a result of the colonizing efforts of the British, the Igbo people were stripped of the social or moral rules that had given their lives a center for centuries.
The term “Second Coming” in the poem makes you think you’re talking about the second coming of Christ- the one where Christ comes to earth and makes a heaven or a Utopia out of earth.
This, of course, is ironic- because WW1 did not usher in the second coming of Christ with peace and prosperity, but it instead it opened the door to greed, destruction and chaos. This is Achebe’s parallel. The coming of the Europeans let “loosed anarchy on the world” of Africa to use Yeats words – for Achebe the horrors of imperialism were marked by the coercing and brutalizing of his people fueled again mostly by Greed. I’m not sure TS Eliot, the king of Allusions could have make a more effective use of the technique.
So, I think that’s enough said. I hope we brought a little of the context of the country of Nigeria, we talked about where Achebe got the title and why he picked it. Now, let’s read the first page of the novel and introduce our hero- Okonkwo. That is the last piece for setting up this amazing story. And I know we’re getting into a lot of context- but it’s necessary. This book is important; it’s groundbreaking, but it’s context is so foundational to understanding the complexity of the concept, it must not be overlooked.
Oh, for sure. I totally agree. Let me read page 1- read through “he had no patience for his father.”
I read one time that one of the questions Achebe was most often asked was why he made his hero so flawed? Wasn’t he supposed to be showing the greatness of the Igbo culture. Achebe’s response is so nuanced and so understated, it’s genius floors me. He said, no. He had no interest in glamorizing Africa, Ibgo culture. Africa does not consist of savages; Africa does not consist of angels. Africa is filled with people. The cultures of Africa, like every other culture on planet earth are also a mixed-bag. There is no perfect culture. There is no perfect place..which is something I think we lose sight of in America, I might say. We must love and accept all of it. In Okonkwo’s case, Achebe creates an Ibgo hero. Now, we’ve read how the Greeks felt about their heros. We saw a little hero in Bilbo, but let’s look at Okonkwo. Patrick Nnoromele, who is a member of the Igbo people, says that A hero in the Igbo culture is one of great courage and strength. A man who works against the destabilizing forces of his community and affects the destinies of others. His life is defined by contradictions, ambivalence because his actions must stand in shart contrast or ordinary behavior. A hero cannot exist outside of the community because he has to stand out in the community by definition. If he is ambitious he has obligations to his society, but sometimes that creates a problem if your self-interest comes in conflict with the society you’re in. This is really a complicated paradox. So, when we get to Okonkwo, we immediately understand that the single passion of his life is to be of of the lords of the clan. Acebe says it is his “life-spring” and the first challenge he faces is that his dad is loser. So, the first chapter sets up Okonkwo in contrast to his father. His father was a male, but among the Igbo, he was never a man. In order for Okonkwo to become a hero, the first thing he had to do was overcome his father’s reputation.
That’s where we will stop for today. We get more into Igbo culture next week. I really really love this stuff, so I hope I don’t go overboard. I’m very excited about this book, so I hope you enjoy reading it with us if you haven’t already.
Oh, and I love it too. I’ve never been to Africa, so this is opening up a new world for me. I’m excited and look forward to discussing the next few chapters next week…..
Peace out!
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