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Things Fall Apart: the plot
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Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel tells the story of Okonkwo, a respected man in the Igbo village of Umuofia, in what is now Nigeria, before and after British missionaries and colonial rule arrive.
Part 1: Umuofia
Ikemefuna, a boy from another village, is given to Umuofia to settle a dispute and lives with Okonkwo's family for three years. When the elders decide he must be killed, Okonkwo strikes the fatal blow so as not to look weak.
At a funeral, Okonkwo's gun explodes and accidentally kills a boy. He must go into exile for seven years.
Part 2: exile
Christian missionaries arrive. Okonkwo's son Nwoye, troubled by Ikemefuna's death, joins the Christians, and Okonkwo rejects him.
Part 3: return and fall
After a convert unmasks an ancestral spirit, the clan destroys the church. The District Commissioner humiliates the leaders.
Okonkwo kills a court messenger, but the clan does not rise with him. He hangs himself. The Commissioner plans to mention him in a book about 'pacifying' the region.
Why is the ending so bitterly ironic?
- Okonkwo was a great man in Umuofia.
- The Commissioner reduces his story to a paragraph in a book about 'pacifying' Africans.
- Achebe shows how colonial writers ignored African lives and cultures.
Answer: A great man's life is reduced to a few lines in a colonial book, showing how colonisers dismissed African history.
Okonkwo's rise and fear of weakness, Ikemefuna's death, accidental killing and exile, missionaries and Nwoye's conversion, return to a changed Umuofia, conflict with the colonial government, Okonkwo's suicide.
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