Chinua Achebe is considered the father of modern African literature, the writer who “opened the magic casements of African fiction.” In the 1950s, Chinua Achebe, among other writers of his generation, really put African literature on the map.
The African Trilogy-comprised of Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, and No Longer at Ease-is his magnum opus. In these masterly novels, Achebe brilliantly imagines the lives of three generations of an African community as their world is upended by the forces of colonialism from the first arrival of the British to the waning days of empire. The underlying theme is the 20th century colonial period, and the struggles faced by Africans and British expats alike to come to terms with each other, with each other's religious and other customs, and with the system of colonial administration the authorities in London demand.
The stories that make up the 'African Trilogy' are fictional representations of a historical, not-so-distant past. Set just one hundred years ago, Chinua Achebe's trilogy winds and unwinds the Nigerian view of European colonialism in the Scramble for Africa. Achebe was a master craftsman of African literature, and his work here has the effect of rebuilding a lost past.
Akinosho Highlights Achebe's Contributions To African Literature - Part 2
Things Fall Apart
The trilogy opens with the groundbreaking Things Fall Apart, the tale of Okonkwo, a hero in his village, whose clashes with missionaries-coupled with his own tragic pride-lead to his fall from grace. Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on Okonkwo, a “strong man” of an Ibo village in Nigeria.
The first, a powerful fable of the immemorial conflict between the individual and society, traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world. The second, as modern as the first is ancient, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo’s world with the arrival of aggressive European missionaries. These perfectly harmonized twin dramas are informed by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul.
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Achebe’s writing is lyrical, poetic, descriptive, emotional, but also spare and pointed. He doesn’t waste words describing Okonkwo’s pre-colonial world; he gives us the broad strokes of how the village (and Okonkwo’s compound within it) functions, how the village relates to other villages, but he lets our imagination fill in the color and proliferation of fauna, the exact facial features of the main characters, the way the villagers dress.
Nor giving us the exact years as to when the story takes place; he assumes we are either familiar with when European colonialism swelled across Nigeria or that we can look it up for ourselves after the fact. Achebe also doesn’t waste words, or time, explicitly showing us any scene that doesn’t propel the narrative: years go by between chapters, and sometimes even between scenes. The lack of these physical and time details helps maintain the novel’s fable-like structure and tone.
Another thing that intrigued me: Achebe doesn’t go out of his way to make his main character likeable. Oknokwo is domineering, mean, judgmental, rigid, closed to advice from even his closest friends unless that advice involves “saving face” in the community, quick to blame others for things that are clearly his own fault … essentially full of what we would now call “toxic masculinity.” And yet, he’s also a captivating figure. I could not look away from the narrative, had to know what would happen next.
As much as I didn’t like Okonkwo, I had to know how he would navigate (or fail to navigate) the cultural changes around him - both those of his own doing (like his banishment to the village of his mother for something he was advised against doing) and those outside his control (the mesmerizing hold of the European Christian missionaries on the disaffected youth of the villages).
Ultimately, Okonkwo is so rigid in his beliefs, and in his own sense of self, that he cannot bring himself to accept the way the world is changing around him, nor can he see himself as a part of that world as it moves forward and envelopes all he loves. In the end, although I didn’t like Okonkwo I could feel pity for him, could understand where such a strong-willed and rigid man would be battered by the sea-changes around him and find himself unequal to the task of changing. And that, more than anything else, is what moved me about the book and made me want to read the rest of the Africa Trilogy as soon as possible. I need to see where Achebe takes these themes in the succeeding books.
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Historically, Things Fall Apart is situated in the context of the late colonial period, capturing the complexities and tensions of the encounter between African communities and European powers. Achebe’s work stands as a critique of European and American colonial narratives that often marginalized or misrepresented African perspectives. Beyond its historical significance, the novel remains relevant today, addressing themes of identity, power, and the enduring consequences of colonial legacies.
Achebe gives us a look at a world completely outside the bounds of the reader's experience. In this world there is nothing but the clan. There is no police authority, no government, no tax agency, and so on. Important decisions are made by the clansmen collectively, with certain more highly ranking individuals having a disproportionate say in what is to be done.
The clan's "rules" can be appalling. Twins are considered evil and are routinely killed, left to die of exposure in what is known as the Evil Forest. Child mortality is very high. To deal with the trauma of child mortality the clan has developed a myth: It is believed that some women whose children repeatedly die are in fact bearing what is known as ogbanje. The glossary in the back of this edition defines an ogbanje as "a changeling; a child who repeatedly dies and returns to its mother to be reborn." When the child dies, if it is suspected of being an ogbanje, the tribal shaman multilates its body before tossing it into the Evil Forest. If the woman later bears a child with the same mutilations then the suspicion of the ogbanje is confirmed. So, massive is the ignorance here that it takes the breath away. There is universal inarticulateness, and no form of written language. People act out in the most appalling way. The reader does come to think of the Igbo here as a primitive and bestial people.
But then the white man comes. And the white man, the colonizer, British in this case, brings with him his religion, his government, his law and most notably his readiness to condemn the clan cosmogony as pure evil, a product of the devil. The Brits waste little time instilling their superior thought in the clansmen. The reader is torn. Are the tribespeople better off losing their indigenous culture to imperialist usurpers? That would certainly mean less disease for them, reduced infant mortality, an increased rational understanding of certain natural phenonmena they would otherwise mythologize. It's clear there's much to be gained from the white man. But in the end the tribespeople can't pick and choose. They have Western culture thrust down their throats. It is, in the end, what amounts to a wholesale cultural annihilation of the Igbo by the whites.
The Igbo try to strike back by burning down the Christian church. This reader found this scene a wonderful moment of the old tribal resolve reasserting itself. But Okonkwo and the men who do it are arrested by the colonizers. They are jailed. During their incarceration they are beaten, starved, not treated with the respect their tribal status warrants. They are released only when the tribe pays a ransom. The next morning they meet to decide what is to be done. During the meeting, five of the white man's native (and pusillanimous) clerks arrive to tell the Igbo that they must break up their meeting. In his frustration Okonkwo lashes out and kills a clerk. But his clansmen do not respond by killing the other four clerks, who escape.
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Suffice it to say though that Okonkwo, in an act of desperation, undertakes an act that is the negation of all he has ever believed in and stood for, no matter how problematic that might be viewed. It's a devastating moment driving home some of the points earlier expressed here.
Chinua Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930. His first novel, Things Falls Apart, became a classic of international literature and required reading for students worldwide.
Igbo People
Arrow of God
Arrow of God takes up the ongoing conflict between continuity and change as Ezeulu, the headstrong chief priest, finds his authority is under threat from rivals and colonial functionaries. But he believes himself to be untouchable and is determined to lead his people, even if it is towards their own destruction.
Achebe, “Arrow of God” (1964) - This is the end of what they used to call Chinua Achebe’s “African Trilogy.” Achebe wrote more books set in Africa, it’s not like there aren’t other African trilogies, etc. It also helps that Achebe had real talent. He’s equally at home in describing Igbo village life, British colonial administration, and the people whose lives occurred uncomfortably between the two. “Arrow of God” might be my favorite of the trilogy.
Here he tells the story of Ezeulu, high priest of the main god of an Igbo village during the period between the world wars. Ezeulu is in the familiar “African Trilogy” position, trapped between village life and “modernity” as represented by the British. But Achebe also resists facile dichotomies.
Being my kind of nerd, I really love Achebe’s depictions of Igbo society. Never didactic, he throws you into the deep end of Igbo complexities. The British never liked the Igbo (save for some missionaries who liked their relative openness to Christianity) in no small part because Igbo culture resisted the sort of informational/governmental grid any colonizer needs to throw over the people it oppresses.
The British felt (rightly or wrongly) they “had a handle” on the Muslim societies in the north of Nigeria, or for that matter, the Zulus or the Afrikaaners they fought in South Africa. They might fight, but the British understood fighting. They really couldn’t wrap their minds around the way Igbo did hierarchy.
It’s not to say they didn’t have hierarchy- they had plenty, and Ezeulu was near the top, locally. As far as I can tell from this book and a few others, in Igbo tradition, the Igbo raise their own gods. Sometimes, they memorialize (or catalyze?) important events- a war, a famine, the life of someone important. Ulu is the civic god of the village federation where Ezeulu lives, a sometimes-uneasy alliance got together to ward off attacks from another village and sealed by the raising of the god Ulu.
That the Igbo could raise new gods to honor events within historical memory mystified the British some, but could be filed under various racist rubrics. What really threw the colonial overlords was Igbo governance. Not only was there no central leadership to the ethnicity as a whole, but even most of the villages didn’t have a single recognized leader.
“What are Africans without a chief?” you can almost hear them crying out, and so under once-legendary colonial administrator Frederick Lugard, the British simply found important (or just self-important) men in each Igbo village and appointed a chief, someone they could talk to and channel orders through. Predictably, this didn’t work well.
None of this is to imply the Igbo were some anarchist society, except maybe in the sense “anarchist” sometimes translates out to “lots and lots of meetings.” The villages, confederations, clans, religious societies et al of Igboland are forever disputing internally and externally, in the telling of historians, ethnographers, and writers like Achebe.
If the British were less racist, they’d probably see the Igbo way of doing things as not too dissimilar from their favorites, the ancient Greeks. There’s a great emphasis on performing public good for public glory to accrue to one’s village, one’s lineage, oneself. Ezeulu competes in this world of rivalries in a haughty and sometimes off-handed fashion. He’s already pretty high up when the book starts. But his unyielding stubbornness and conviction that old ways are best doesn’t help him.
Rivals in the village get it to go to war over Ezeulu’s objections, and when the British put a stop to it, these rivals make Ezeulu out to be a stooge for the whites. His kids are scattered in different directions, some dissolute on palm wine, some looking for other ways out, some just scared. He sends one son to learn the ways of the British, including Christianity, but the son gets in too deep and causes some major problems. The British offer Ezeulu one of their made-up chiefdoms and he scores some points back home by refusing it, but by then, it’s too late. He tried to regain control over the villages by delaying a key harvest festival, but that only makes things worse.
Arrow of God
No Longer at Ease
Finally, in No Longer at Ease, Okonkwo’s grandson, educated in England, returns to a civil-service job in Lagos, only to see his morality erode as he clings to his membership in the ruling elite. In No Longer at Ease (1960) by Chinua Achebe, Obi Okonkwo, the grandson of Okonkwo of Achebe's debut novel Things Fall Apart (1958), comes back from England as the first person in his village, Umuofia, to have finished his studies abroad with the 'scholarship'.
The expense of Obi's education was borne by Umuofia Progressive Union which was formed by the Umuofians who were abroad "with the aim of collecting money to send some of their brighter young men to study in England". Obi gets a "'European post' in the civil service" and his monthly expenditure, among other things, includes paying back the 'scholarship', sending money home for his family as well as for paying the fees of his brother and the monthly installments of the car he has bought.
In the novel, Obi faces a similar tussle like his grandfather. Torn between the image of his home before he went to England and the merciless reality after homecoming, Obi is no longer at ease. As a person whose father had accepted Christianity and who has returned from England after finishing his studies, he finds disparities with the people around him and is ill at ease with them. The Britishers chide him for everything that the Nigerians do wrong - even if the wrong was first spread by them - and he has his differences with the people of his village. In a world that is breaking apart with the tug of war of independence, just like his grandfather, Obi finds himself alone.
One central strand of Achebe’s recovery of the past in these novels is an Igbo philosophy that is expressed in a proverb he offered up in No Longer at Ease: “Wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it.” Achebe often used this proverb in discussing his work, and he explained its significance once in an interview: “It means there is no one way to anything….If there is one God, fine, there will be others as well…. If there is one point of view, fine. There will be a second point of view.” The characters of his novels get into trouble in large measure because they fail to acknowledge this pluralistic vision.
It is only in No Longer at Ease that the opposition between the world of colonialism and older Igbo values takes center stage. Its main character, Obi, is the grandson of Okonkwo. The people of his hometown have banded together to send him to England for an education. When Obi returns to a job in the colonial administration, they expect him to share with them the fruits of his education. His alienation from their world precipitates a series of crises, as he tries to balance his obligations to them with his own, rather different values. But in this novel, too, Achebe represents the duality of Igbo society through the tensions between the new Christianity, represented by his father, and the traditions of Igbo narrative, which he learns from his mother. And Obi falls in the end in part because he sees an either-or in a situation that demands a both-and.
No Longer at Ease
Themes and Style
Drawing on the traditional Igbo tales of Achebe’s youth, The African Trilogy is a literary landmark, a mythic and universal tale of modern Africa. As Toni Morrison wrote, “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.
Through these works, the problem that occupies Achebe most urgently is that of leadership in changing times. In precolonial culture, the figure of the elder exemplified a model of authority as selfless service, regulating and moderating destabilizing elements. The trilogy shows the systematic erosion of that function and the ascendancy of the colonial bureaucrat, for whom a parallel ideal of disinterestedness merges with a pitiless and dehumanizing gaze. Undoubtedly, this loss is central to the tragedy depicted by the novels. What they also show, the essay argues, however, is a persistent, creative spirit of adaptation in the society Achebe portrays.
Achebe was always clear that he saw the task of the African writer in his day as providing a counterblast to the misrepresentation of Africa in the European writings about the continent he had studied in his English literature classes in college. What was missing in all of them, he thought, was a recognition of Africans as people with projects-lives they were leading, aspirations they were striving for-and a rich existing culture, exemplified in the proverbs and the religious traditions that are threaded through these novels. He was writing, as he often said, against the Africa of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
One reason for this, which often passes without notice, is that Achebe solved a problem that these earlier novels did not. He found a way to represent for a global Anglophone audience the diction of his Igbo homeland, allowing readers of English elsewhere to experience a particular relationship to language and the world in a way that made it seem quite natural-transparent, one might almost say. Achebe enables us to hear the voices of Igboland in a new use of our own language. A measure of his achievement is that Achebe found an African voice in English that is so natural its artifice eludes us.
The voice I am talking about is, first of all, the narrative voice of the novel. This invocation of shared proverbial wisdom is also found in the direct speech of the characters. As someone who has struggled over the years to translate proverbs from my father’s Asante language, I know how hard it is to make this proverbial way of speaking, this traditional form of argument, available in English. In these novels, both in the direct speech of Igbo characters and in the voice of the novel itself, we come to understand, appreciate, and accept the naturalness of this mode of speech and of thought. This allows us to enter an unfamiliar world as if it were our own. As James Baldwin put it: “When I read Things Fall Apart which is about…a society the rules of which were a mystery to me, I recognized everybody in it.” It is a mark of Achebe’s success that many of the African writers who followed him took up his way of representing the speech-world of their own societies.
T. S. Eliot (whose poem “The Journey of the Magi” provided the title of No Longer at Ease) once said he doubted “whether a poet or novelist can be universal without being local too.” I can think of no literary work that more persuasively confirms this judgment than Chinua Achebe’s trilogy, which evokes for us the local world of Igboland while exploring themes that are recognizable to us all.
