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The Oracle of Umuofia eventually pronounces that the boy must be killed. The boy looks up to Okonkwo and considers him a second father. The boy lives with Okonkwo's family and Okonkwo grows fond of him. He is a leader of his village, and he has accomplished a position in his society for which he has striven all his life.īecause of the great esteem in which the village holds him, Okonkwo is selected by the elders to be the guardian of Ikemefuna, a boy taken prisoner by the village as a peace settlement between two villages after Ikemefuna's father killed an Umuofian woman. Although brusque with his three wives, children, and neighbors, he is wealthy, courageous, and powerful among the people of his village. The protagonist Okonkwo is strong, hard-working, and strives to show no weakness. It is not simply something you use because you have it anyway." Plot summary English was the language of colonization itself. Also, in the logic of colonization and decolonization it is actually a very powerful weapon in the fight to regain what was yours. Achebe has continued to defend his decision: "English is something you spend your lifetime acquiring, so it would be foolish not to use it. While both African and non-African critics agree that Achebe modeled Things Fall Apart on classic European literature, they disagree about whether his novel upholds a Western model, or, in fact, subverts or confronts it. It doesn't go anywhere." Īchebe's choice to write in English has caused controversy. There's nothing you can do with it to make it sing. Because the missionaries were powerful, what they wanted to do they did. He had this notion that the Igbo language-which had very many different dialects-should somehow manufacture a uniform dialect that would be used in writing to avoid all these different dialects. They sent out a missionary by the name of Dennis. It suffers from a very serious inheritance, which it received at the beginning of this century from the Anglican mission. There is a problem with the Igbo language. In a 1994 interview with The Paris Review, Achebe said, "the novel form seems to go with the English language. Language choiceĪchebe writes his novels in English because written Standard Igbo was created by combining various dialects, creating a stilted written form. His grandfather, far from opposing Achebe's conversion to Christianity, allowed Achebe's Christian marriage to be celebrated in his compound. Achebe himself was an orphan raised by his grandfather. Achebe's father was among the first to be converted in Ogidi, around the turn of the century. Within forty years of the arrival of the British, by the time Achebe was born in 1930, the missionaries were well established. The customs described in the novel mirror those of the actual Onitsha people, who lived near Ogidi, and with whom Achebe was familiar. The culture depicted, that of the Igbo people, is similar to that of Achebe's birthplace of Ogidi, where Igbo-speaking people lived together in groups of independent villages ruled by titled elders. The events of the novel unfold around the 1890s. The majority of the story takes place in the village of Umuofia, located west of the actual city of Onitsha, on the east bank of the Niger River in Nigeria. 6 Film, television, and theatrical adaptations.Achebe states that his two later novels, A Man of the People ( 1966) and Anthills of the Savannah ( 1987), while not featuring Okonkwo's descendants, are spiritual successors to the previous novels in chronicling African history. Things Fall Apart was followed by a sequel, No Longer at Ease ( 1960), originally written as the second part of a larger work together with Things Fall Apart, and Arrow of God ( 1964), on a similar subject. It focuses on his family and personal history, the customs and society of the Igbo, and the influence of British colonialism and Christian missionaries on the Igbo community during the late nineteenth century. The novel depicts the life of Okonkwo, a leader and local wrestling champion in Umuofia-one of a fictional group of nine villages in Nigeria, inhabited by the Igbo people (archaically, and in the novel, "Ibo"). The title of the novel comes from William Butler Yeats's poem "The Second Coming". It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first African novels written in English to receive global critical acclaim. Things Fall Apart is an English-language novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe published in 1958. For other uses, see Things Fall Apart (disambiguation).