Chinua Achebe For the CSET

While the text of Things Fall Apart is still under copyright and therefore can not be published here, we will still do a brief summary followed by a video link.

Things Fall Apart provides significant value to the understanding of African history and human nature. Achebe fiercely resents the stereotype of Africa as an undifferentiated “primitive” land, the “heart of darkness”, as Joseph Conrad calls it. Throughout the novel he shows how African cultures vary among themselves and how they change over time. He displays Africa as a land where respect for fellow man and for ancestors runs deep, where law-keeping is fair and the people work hard.

The importance of this text can be seen in its worldwide distribution as an authentic narrative about the horrors of the colonialist experience from the eyes of the colonized. This daring perspective brought to the world the figure of Okonkwo, a powerful and respected village elder who cannot single-handedly repel the invasion of foreign culture into his village.

Things Fall Apart is a tragic and moving story of Okonkwo and the destruction of the village of Umuofia by the colonialist enterprise.

Point of View

Things Fall Apart is written in a third person: the reader experiences the novel through an outside narrator. This way the reader is able to not only read the dialogue but the thoughts of the characters as well. This allows dramatic irony to occur.

Setting

The novel is set during the late 1800s and early 1900s in a small village called Umuofia situated in the southeastern part of Nigeria. The time period is important, as it was a period in colonial history when the British were expanding their influence in Africa.

Umuofia is an Igbo village that is respected by those around it as being powerful and rich with deep traditions. When Okonkwo is banished from his village, he takes his family to his mother’s native village called Mbanta, where he is given two or three plots of land to farm, and a plot of ground on which to build his compound. The next seven years of Okonkwo’s life are spent in the village of Mbanta. He then returns to Umuofia where the rest of the novel takes place.