The manuscript nearly vanished. Chinua Achebe sent his only typed copy of a novel to a typing agency in London, and for months nothing came back. A colleague had to chase the agency in person. That novel, Things Fall Apart, was published in 1958 and became the most widely read work of African fiction in the world.
Okonkwo
The novel follows Okonkwo, a proud and respected man of Umuofia, a cluster of Igbo villages in the late nineteenth century. Okonkwo is a wrestler, farmer and warrior, driven by fear of being weak like his father. His life unravels as personal mistakes and the arrival of British missionaries and colonial government change his world.
The title
The title comes from W.B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Achebe used it to describe the collapse of a society under colonial pressure.
Answering Europe
Achebe wrote partly in response to European novels that portrayed Africans as savages or as part of the scenery. He later criticised Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in a famous lecture. Things Fall Apart shows an African society with its own laws, religion, politics and art, complicated and flawed but fully human.
The African Writers Series
In 1962, Heinemann launched its African Writers Series with Things Fall Apart as the first title, and Achebe became the series’ founding editor. The series published many of the most important African writers of the following decades and made their books affordable for African readers.
Millions of copies
Things Fall Apart has sold millions of copies and has been translated into dozens of languages. It is studied in schools across Africa, including in Ghana, and around the world.
The sequels
Achebe continued the story in No Longer at Ease (1960), about Okonkwo’s grandson, and wrote Arrow of God (1964) about another Igbo community. Together they are sometimes called the African Trilogy.
Achebe’s later life
Achebe was injured in a car accident in Nigeria in 1990 and used a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He taught in the United States for many years and twice declined Nigerian national honours in protest at the state of the country. He died in 2013 in Boston.
Still being read
Nearly seven decades after it appeared, Things Fall Apart still opens the door to African literature for many readers. Its title has been borrowed by musicians, including Kofi Kinaata, and by countless headlines. Few novels are quoted so often by people who have never read them, and fewer still repay reading so well.
