Chinua Achebe · 1958
Things Fall Apart
“The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one.”
Begin ReadingIn 1958, a young Nigerian writer named Chinua Achebe published his first novel. It told the story of Okonkwo, a great warrior of the Igbo people, and of a world — its gods, its harvests, its wrestling matches, its proverbs and its cruelties — that was about to be destroyed by the arrival of European colonialism. That novel, Things Fall Apart, became the most widely read African novel in history: over 20 million copies sold, translated into more than 60 languages, and taught in classrooms on every continent. This site is a guide to the novel, its author, and the civilization it memorializes.
“Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.”
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Achebe did not write a lament. He wrote a confrontation — with Conrad, with the colonial archive, with the notion that Africa had no history before Europeans arrived to give it one. In prose as spare and dignified as an Igbo elder's judgment, he showed that the world that was destroyed was real, complex, beautiful, and flawed — in other words, fully human. More than sixty years later, we are still reckoning with what he achieved.