Things Fall Apart

This book is the first in the “African Trilogy”, which consists of Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God. Despite being quite short — only 256 pages — it doesn’t read quickly, due to its specific style and narrative. But it’s very engaging.

This is a story not only about the colonisation of African countries and the destruction of their traditional way of life and culture, but also about the destruction of a person’s inner balance and the devastating consequences of their choices.

From the very beginning, we’re presented with a protagonist who is already coming apart. Okonkwo is ashamed of and hostile toward his lazy, unsuccessful father, struggles with aggression, and is heavily dependent on social approval and status. He is unable to adapt when life forces him to change — and he doesn’t treat all of his children equally.

It’s also clear from early on that some villagers join the Christian church because they find something there that their own religion or community couldn’t give them, or because they already disagreed with something in their world. This is what begins to fracture the commune from within.

Those were good days when a man had friends in distant clans. Your generation does not know that. You stay at home, afraid of your next-door neighbour. Even a man’s motherland is strange to him nowadays.

I liked that the author doesn’t present the situation as black and white, with one side clearly good and the other clearly bad. We see the pros and cons of both. Both systems have their strengths and their failures. I’d even say this isn’t really a clash of two different worlds, but of two surprisingly similar ones — not in origin, but in structure — since both groups are deeply religious, strongly tied to their traditions, and convinced they’re right.

The story also made me think about mono- and polytheism, and how the religion a society chooses reflects its way of life: one has a group of leaders and elders (polytheism, horizontal hierarchy), the other has a single leader or church (monotheism, vertical hierarchy). You can also map this onto the divide between collectivism and individualism — or roughly, communism and capitalism — as systems of social organisation.