Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe (1958)
“The novel that told Africa's story from inside — written to answer Conrad's Heart of Darkness on behalf of every culture colonialism erased.”
At a Glance
Okonkwo, a proud and powerful Igbo warrior in Umuofia, rises from his father's shameful poverty to become one of the clan's most respected men. After accidentally killing a clansman, he is exiled to his motherland for seven years. When he returns, Christian missionaries and British colonial administrators have transformed Umuofia. Unable to adapt and unwilling to submit, Okonkwo kills a colonial messenger and, realizing his clan will not go to war, hangs himself — leaving the District Commissioner to think of him as a paragraph in a book.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Things Fall Apart is the best-selling African novel ever written and the founding text of African literature in English as a canonical form. Before Achebe, the African novel in English was written by Europeans — Conrad, Cary, Rider Haggard — all of whom wrote Africa from outside. Achebe wrote it from inside. The novel proved that African writers could write their own history in English without surrendering to colonial literary conventions.
Diction Profile
Formal English inflected with Igbo oral tradition — declarative sentences, communal narration, proverb-embedded wisdom
Moderate