Chinua Achebe was well known throughout the thirty-six states of the federation and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements via his writings.
Chinua Achebe was well known throughout the thirty-six states of the federation and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements via his writings.
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As a young man of twenty-eight years, he had brought honour to his country by writing Things Fall Apart.
Things Fall Apart was a great masterpiece which has sold more than ten million copies and has been translated into forty-five languages; from Africa to Asia and Europe.
He was called the founding father of modern African Literature in English because of the ‘cumulative publication of a number of highly commended works of creative writing’, among which Things Fall Apart stands out like an iroko tree.
It was this book Achebe wrote which the critics and the public agreed was one of the finest since the founding of their literary world in pre and post-colonial Africa.
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(An adaptation of Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” Chapter one, Paragraph one)
I had my first encounter with the literary Iroko twenty-seven years ago as a secondary school girl in Form four when we were first introduced to Literature in English.
Before then, we were engrossed in English Literature; we read foreign fictions such as Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan, Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, Montezuma’s Daughters’ by H. Rider Haggard, Lamb tales from Shakespeare and Merchant of Venice by Williams Shakespeare which were very alien and strange to us because we did not have first hand experience of the images, imageries, symbols presented in the novels, poems, and dramas. It really discouraged a lot of people who would have been great poets, playwrights and novelists from literature.
The English literature classes were so uninteresting and boring that half-way through the lessons most of the students would have dozed off. It made them switch off permanently from anything literature. But those of us that like arts-for-arts sake stayed because our people say that when one is paid with what he or she likes whether it is enough or not he or she accepts without complaining so we stayed in literature classes.
It was in Form Four that we were brought home with the introduction of Things Fall Apart and literature became an interesting subject to study. May be, during that period the curriculum planners did not know that one of the fundamental principles in teaching is starting from known to unknown. In this case, starting from our own literature to foreign ones.
Things Fall Apart was home made. It was a novel made by an African for Africans. The piece portrayed our environment, our values and our culture in its entirety. We identified with the characters, the plot, and the style. The language was our everyday language, so it was a lot easier for us to comprehend and appreciate. We were very familiar with the proverbs (the palm oil with which words are eaten) and the folklores. We had no need to memorize any speech or stories. Things Fall Apart became very interesting that even the excerpts of the The Second Coming, poem by W.B. Yeats from where Achebe drew the title of his novel were unconsciously taken in. We knew every line of it and we sang it;
“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 literature classes became so lively and issue-based that we spent most of the time debating and discussing issues the novel raised and in most cases the issues were what formed part of our examination questions.
The issues are not only religious and socio-cultural but contemporary; there is religious intolerance exemplified by overzealous Enoch in the book who killed the python and that sparked off the fire of religious imbroglio that consumed Okonkwo. In Nigeria today, we have a group of politico-religious fanatics, the Boko-Haram who are bent on destroying this entity called Nigeria, they should go and learn a lesson from Okonkwo.
Domestic violence was highlighted in Things Fall Apart, cases of wife battery abound, Okonkwo broke the week of peace when he tried shooting Ojiugo and Uzowulu’s everyday battery of wife that led to the wife’s miscarriage. In Africa, domestic violence is still very high because of the age at which a girl is given out in marriage to a man old enough to be her father, thus the husband sees her as a child to be tamed through physical and verbal abuse; early marriage was a tradition portrayed in the novel, which has social and health implications for women.
Another issue in the book that has contemporary implication is Okonkwo’s inability to adjust to change; which led to his tragic fall. The world is in a state of flux and one does not stand at a place to watch a masquerade, one need to adjust from time to time in order to get a good glimpse of the masquerade. If we are to relate it to Nigeria and our economy we do not need to depend on oil alone as our mainstay, today’s economy is controlled by those who have invested in the development of intellectual property and diversified economy. If we are unable to change we will be swept off by change and its attendant consequences.
Achebe did not leave out our time-honoured values of hard work and good friendship in this timeless book. Okonkwo, though from a poor father was one of the greatest men of his time, he clearly washed his hands through hard work and solid personal achievement and so he ate with kings and elders. It is a lesson for our youths who engage in all kinds of nefarious activities that fame and wealth could only come from hard work.
Obierika was a friend at all times and a friend indeed. He stood by Okonkwo through thick and thin, he was a friend that stuck closer than a brother. Do we have such people now when money is the sole determinant of relationships?
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart touches every segment of life with every detail making it a pure representation of life and that is what literature is all about. Literature is life.
The second time encounter with Chinua Achebe was at the then Anambra State College of Education, Awka where we studied African Literature under the tutelage of these masters, Late Prof Ezenwa- Ohaeto and Prof. J.O.J Nwachukwu-Agbada. This time it was not just Things Fall Apart and his other works –Arrow of God, No Longer At Ease, A man of the People that we studied in deeper dimensions; but also other literary giants among whom are Wole Soyinka , Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Sembene Ousmane, Ferdinand Oyono, Elechi Amadi and other great and renowned African writers of our time. They were Africans who relayed African experiences for Africans.
Things Fall Apart was the most memorable initiation into the world of African Literature, home grown, literature made by an African for Africans.
Things Fall Apart is a lamentation of Western incursion into our culture. What Achebe is bemoaning is not the entrant of westernisation but a complete erosion of what is good in our culture. Unfortunately, it came with religion (Christianity) which I am an adherent 100 percent. It behoves on us to have the ability to sift the grain from the chaff. Obierika laments, “... He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart”.
It is the Western culture not Christianity that has put a knife on our time cherished values. Our values erode day by day because we and our children have this penchant for anything western. Western movies, western music, western clothes, western values with its moral degradation. It is Westernization that brought homosexuality (same sex marriage), single-parenthood by choice not by death of a spouse, older women marrying younger men; even negating the very Christianity they brought to us. God did not make it so. Now, that we have the religion, we should be able to muster the moral courage and tell the Western world that Ikwikwi, (the owl) farted and asked his kinsmen to beat the drum for him and his kinsmen said TUFIA-KWA that they do not drum for bad things. We should be bold to tell the West that they do not sing for evil as Anglican Communion in Nigeria and Africa told them in Lamberth Conference that homosexuality is an abomination.
When you had that fatal accident, you said ‘yes’ strongly to life and your chi (God) said yes also; and so you did not die but when death finally came you could not resist it ,you translated from ‘the land of the living’ to ‘the domain of the ancestors’ as you put it in Things Fall Apart. Adieu! Our literary icon!
Mrs Grace Igbokwe (Phd)
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