9 Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart – The Context

Prof. Ipshita Chanda

Contents

• Introduction
• Text introduction
• The context: Representations of Africa
• The image of Africa in Western writing
• Myths of Africa
• Achebe’s analysis and response
• Achebe’s worldview
• Achebe’s method
• Summary

Introduction

This module is about Chinua Achebe and his classic novel Things Fall Apart. Since Things Fall Apart is a seminal novel in African literature, it will be discussed in two modules. In this module, we will analyze the broader context in which the novel can be understood. By the end of the module, it is hoped that you will get an idea of the larger significance of the novel and its place in African literature as a whole.

Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) is an African writer, and more specifically, he is a Nigerian writer. Although he has written fiction, poetry, and literary criticism, Achebe is best known for his five novels: Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). While Achebe’s first four novels appeared within a short period of eight years, there was a long gap of 20 years between his fourth and fifth novels.

The beginnings of modern African novel could be traced to the Lesotho writer Thomas Mofolo’s (1876-1948) historical epic Chaka (1925; though said to have been written in 1908/9) and Soloman Plaatje’s (1876-1932) Mhudi (1930). Chaka was originally written in Sesotho or Southern Sotho and was later translated into English. Mhudi, on the other hand, was the first novel in English by a black South African writer. These early examples notwithstanding, it was, however, Peter Abrahams’ (1919-2017) novel Song of the City (1945) that received a wide readership—Abrahams was the first black South African writer to have his works published in England and the US.

Nigerian, and indeed African novel in English, began to acquire an identity of its own in the 1950s, and one of the first manifestations of it was Amos Tutuola’s (1920-1997) The Palm- Wine Drinkard (1952). Tutuola’s ‘novel’, perhaps influenced by the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Gulliver’s Travels was seen in the West as a representative African novel because of its ‘odd’ language and form. However, Cyprian Ekwensi’s (1921-2007) People of the City (1954) became the first modern novel in the realistic mode to offer a portrayal of contemporary African society.

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was published in 1958, i.e., two years before Nigeria became independent in 1960. Although Things Fall Apart is not the first novel written by African writer, it is easily the best known work of African literature, and also one of the most recognized books of the 20th century. Widely regarded as a modern classic, the novel has put African literature firmly on the literary map of the world. It has been translated into more than 50 languages, sold over 12 million copies, and is taught in schools, colleges, and universities all over the world.

However, the real significance of Things Fall Apart lies neither in the number of copies sold nor the number of languages into which it has been translated. Things Fall Apart is a great novel not just because it tells a wonderful story or because Achebe is master craftsman. More importantly, Things Fall Apart is a foundational text, a text that constituted the core around which a literary tradition could be built. The larger significance of Achebe’s novel can be understood when it is read in a broader context: the long tradition of European representation of Africa, the colonial representation of Africa in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Achebe’s views on the role of an artist in society.

The projection of Africa as a dark, dangerous, savage, and mysterious place in Western discourse has a nearly 400 year history. Europe ‘discovered’ Africa in the 15th century and soon after started the Transatlantic Slave Trade. One of the earliest full-length books in English that refers to Africa is Thomas Underdowne’s An Aethiopian History (1569; rev. 1577), a translation of the ancient Greek romance Aethiopica by Heliodorus .

Students of literature would also recall the references to African characters in Shakespeare’s plays like Titus Andronicus (1594), Othello (1604), and The Tempest (1611). By the 19th century every major European power wanted to grab a piece of Africa—obviously for its natural resources and its importance in geo-politics. Hence there was a ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the period from 1880-1914. Then after the Berlin Conference of 1884, the European powers divided Africa among themselves. The rapid growth and spread of colonialism can be understood by the fact that while in 1870 only 10% Africa was under European control, by 1914, 90% of Africa came under European control.

Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow studied the image of ‘Negro Africa’ in Western writing of nearly 400 years and published their findings in two books: The Africa That Never Was (1970) and The Myth of Africa (1977). Their study identified two sets of ‘myths’ about Africa: racial myths (about Africans as people) and spatial myths (about Africa as a place). As for racial myths, the African is seen either as a beastly savage or as a noble savage. As a beastly savage, the African is seen as simple, primitive, cruel, lazy, arrogant, and physically ugly. As a noble savage, he is viewed as handsome, brave, self-confident, aristocratic, and as an object of inordinate and exaggerated admiration. The second set of myths about Africa as a place involves presenting Africa as either the white man’s grave or as the white man’s paradise. Africa is experienced as a place of infinite mystery, physical discomfort, cannibalism, darkness, danger, and disease. Alternatively, Africa turns into the white huntsman’s paradise—a place of great natural beauty, exotic flora and fauna. In more recent times, Africa is used as a testing ground for western characters. It becomes a site for a confrontation between civilization and savagery represented by the white man and the African respectively. Thus, European literature has manufactured the image of Africa as the antithesis of Europe and of civilization.

So, when Achebe set out to write Things Fall Apart, he was deeply aware of the long and lasting tradition of the representation of Africa in Western writing and popular culture. However, an immediate provocation for Achebe to respond to and rebut the persistent Western image of Africa was the recognition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) as one “among the half-dozen greatest short novels in the English language”. Achebe could ignore sensational stories set in Africa written by popular writers like Rider Haggard, but when Conrad’s short novel was hailed as one of the greatest novels, he decided to take a closer look at it. Achebe presented his analysis of Conrad’s novel in the form of a lecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1975 with the title “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (later published with the same title as an essay in 1978). Achebe reads Heart of Darkness as a representative text of the two aspects of colonial representation—its gross injustice, its long and lasting tradition. Achebe accuses Conrad mainly of denying self-representation to Africa by denying history and language to the African characters. Achebe concludes his analysis of the text and its underlying ideology by calling Conrad “a thoroughgoing racist”.

The long tradition of Western representation of Africa and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, thus, provide two frames in which Achebe’s novel could be situated. The third context in which Things Fall Apart could be read is Achebe’s own view of the purpose of all art, and the responsibility of the artist. Achebe asserts that art has a social responsibility and rejects the Western notion of ‘art for art’s sake’ as “just another piece of deodorized dog-shit” (“Africa and Her Writers”). In his well-known essay “The Novelist as Teacher” (in Morning Yet on Creation Day, 1975), Achebe outlines the twin objectives of his writing: to inform the Western/ outside reader that ‘civilization’ is not something that the Africans heard for the first time from the Europeans; and more importantly, to educate the African readers themselves that Africa has had its own history and culture. Thus, countering the colonial stereotypes of Africa and restoring the confidence of the African readers in their own past are important objectives of art for Achebe.

From his reading of Western representation of Africa in general and of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in particular, and from his views on the role and responsibility of an artist, we can understand Achebe’s own worldview and his approach to writing. Achebe writes as a ‘critical insider’: he neither follows tradition blindly nor rejects everything that is associated with the West. He writes as someone who believes in cultures learning from each other. For him, when two cultures come into contact with each other, they have an opportunity to learn the best from each other. But, according to Achebe, during colonialism this natural dialogue between cultures was replaced by a monologue where Western culture, history, and civilization were imposed on non-Western societies as the only valid models. Every society has its own pace and pattern of evolution and Achebe holds colonialism responsible for interfering with and disrupting the course of evolution of African society.

In order to restore African society’s dialogue with its own past and with the outside world, Achebe looks closely at both tradition and modernity. It is to be noted that in the context of colonialism, modernity has connotations that are quite different from those in Europe. For, under colonialism, modernity rode on the back of colonialism and is, therefore, inseparable from it. To begin a dialogue between tradition and modernity, and between indigenous African values and alien Western forms of creative expression, Achebe adopts the ‘Western’ genre of the novel, and the Western language English. There have been many debates in Africa about the suitability of the novel as a form to represent African realities. It was argued that the novel is essentially a Western genre which is infused with an outlook on individuals and their relation to society that is antithetical to the value system of traditional African society. Similarly, there have been arguments about whether or not the African writers should continue to write in colonial languages like English. Achebe adopts the ‘Western’ genre of the novel and the ‘Western’ language English and without overstretching the limits of either the genre or the language, he establishes the reality of Africa and the validity of African culture.

To summarize, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) is a modern classic and its significance is best understood when we read the novel in its broader context. The broader context  comprises three components: the long and lasting tradition of Western and colonial representations of Africa, Achebe’s critique of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and lastly Achebe’s own views on the role and responsibility of a writer in African society. Things Fall Apart can, of course, be enjoyed independently as a wonderfully written novel, and we can appreciate Achebe’s craftsmanship as a novelist. But the larger significance of the novel becomes evident when it is read in the broader context outlined in this module.