The Novel

Part One: The Old World

The novel opens with Okonkwo's fame: at eighteen he threw the great wrestler Amalinze the Cat, a victory still spoken of twenty years later. He is now a wealthy man with three wives, a large compound, and two titles in Umuofia, a federation of nine Igbo villages. But behind him is a shadow — his father Unoka, who died in disgrace, a debtor and a musician, “lazy and improvident.” Everything Okonkwo has built is a fortress against the terror of resembling his father.

Achebe immerses us in the rhythms of Igbo life: the Week of Peace before planting, the Feast of the New Yam, wrestling matches under the moonlight, the kola nut rituals, the oracles consulted, the ancestors honored. It is a world governed by seasons and gods, by the earth goddess Ani and the Oracle of the Hills and Caves. Into this world enters Ikemefuna — a boy from a neighboring village, given to Umuofia as a peace settlement. He lives with Okonkwo's family for three years and becomes like a son, a beloved older brother to Nwoye.

The Oracle decrees that Ikemefuna must die. The village elder Ogbuefi Ezeudu warns Okonkwo not to take part in the killing — the boy calls him father. But when the party of men marches Ikemefuna out of the village and strikes him down with a machete, the wounded boy runs toward Okonkwo crying “Father!” — and Okonkwo, terrified of appearing weak, delivers the fatal blow. This is the moral turning point of the novel. Nwoye, who loved Ikemefuna, is shattered. Something in him goes cold. The seed of his eventual conversion to Christianity is planted here, in the soil of his father's violence.

Part Two: Exile

At Ezeudu's funeral, Okonkwo's gun accidentally explodes and kills Ezeudu's sixteen-year-old son. It is a female crime — inadvertent — but the punishment is absolute: seven years of exile. Okonkwo flees with his family to Mbanta, his mother's village. His maternal uncle Uchendu receives him and delivers one of the novel's most devastating speeches: “A man belongs to his fatherland when things are good and life is sweet. But when there is sorrow and bitterness, he finds refuge in his motherland.”

During Okonkwo's exile, white missionaries arrive. First comes Mr. Kiaga, establishing a church in the Evil Forest — land that the Igbo consider cursed, so the missionaries are given it freely, expecting them to die. But they do not die. The gods are silent. And then the first converts come: the outcasts, the osu, the mothers of twins — people for whom the old religion offered only rejection. Obierika, visiting Okonkwo in exile, delivers the novel's most famous line: “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.”

Part Three: The Fall

Okonkwo returns from exile to find Umuofia transformed. The church has converts. The colonial government has established a court, a prison, and “court messengers” — African collaborators employed by the British District Commissioner. His son Nwoye, renamed Isaac, has become a Christian. Okonkwo is enraged beyond words. He watches his world disintegrate and cannot understand why his people — warriors, men of title — will not fight.

The crisis comes when Enoch, an overzealous convert, unmasks an egwugwu — one of the masked judges who represent the ancestral spirits. This is an abomination: to unmask an egwugwu is to kill an ancestral spirit. The egwugwu burn the church. The District Commissioner summons the six leaders of Umuofia, including Okonkwo, and has them beaten and humiliated. When Okonkwo kills a court messenger, expecting his people to rise, no one follows him. He realizes, in that moment, that the old unity is gone. The clan will not fight. His world — the world that made him a great man — is over.

Okonkwo hangs himself — the ultimate abomination in Igbo tradition, a suicide who cannot be touched by his own people, who will be buried “like a dog” by strangers. And then, in one of the most devastating endings in literature, the District Commissioner reflects: “One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph.” The tragedy of a life — of a civilization — reduced to a paragraph in a colonial administrator's report. The title of the novel comes from William Butler Yeats's poem “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”