When the novel was published on June 17, 1958, by William Heinemann, London, Achebe was only twenty-eight years old. Its publication brought in its wake unprecedented international attention for the author, a literary explosion in Nigeria, and the creation of Heinemann’s African Writers Series. Beyond the originality of its view of cultural nationalism and postcolonial contestation, the outstanding aesthetic qualities of Things Fall Apart—including “the epistemological and textual about-turn”2 of its denouement and the deft transposition of Igbo aesthetics, orature, language, and worldview into the novelistic form—captured the attention of the Western critical establishment, leading to the novel’s enthronement in the world republic of letters. The novel’s stylistic directness and its canonical status have led to its enduring curricular presence, thereby cementing the text in popular consciousness.
While the novel’s literary merits and political impact have been well rehearsed in Africanist and post-colonial scholarly circles, nonspecialist readers of the novel remain largely unaware of the circumstances that produced it. Despite the critical attention, an updated, comprehensive, yet short and accessible history of the novel remained to be written. This is what I have attempted here.
This short history is not a work of literary criticism, even if it draws, in great part, on the tools and intellectual production of the discipline. It both explores and moves beyond the text’s better-known contexts and thematic preoccupations, to engage with a range of work, much of it published in the aftermath of the novel’s fiftieth anniversary, on questions relating to aesthetics, pedagogy, translation, textual materiality, and cultural adaptation and appropriation. It engages with this new and exciting scholarship to ask further questions and provide fresh insights into the story of Things Fall Apart as a milestone, addressing questions of canonicity, influence, and textual mediation.
The first five chapters of this work follow a chronological structure, which shifts to a thematic approach in chapters 6–10. The first part traces the literary, artistic, and political synergies behind Things Fall Apart. Chapter 1 is devoted to Achebe’s early fascination with “the world of stories,” including religious literature, Igbo orality, and, crucially, the precolonial Igbo art form mbari. This is a complex aesthetic practice that merges metaphor, symbolism, and allusion in its sculptural representations of colonial rule, and one of the first vehicles through which the Igbo of the Owerri region sought to negotiate, historicize, and alleviate the shock of the colonial encounter. Focusing on the author’s “mbari poetics” adds nuance to the novel’s representations of colonial violence while situating the novel itself as a modern mbari house of sorts, and it provides yet another entry point for readers of Things Fall Apart, as well as Arrow of God. The second chapter discusses some aspects of Achebe’s education at Government College, Umuahia, but focuses more intently on his later encounters with the literature of empire at University College, Ibadan. It shows how some of his early writing anticipated the formal aspects and thematic preoccupations of Things Fall Apart. Chapter 3 addresses Achebe’s authorial intentions, the process of composition, and his literary networks. It also traces the manuscript’s journey from submission to publication and its postpublication trajectory.
The book’s second part revolves around questions of influence and impact. Chapter 4 explores the novel’s initial impact in Nigeria and abroad, discussing its early reviews and showing how it precipitated a literary revolution in Nigeria. Chapter 5 maps out the dominant critical strands that have arisen in response to the novel, while chapter 6 develops further chapter 4’s discussion of Achebe’s contemporaries and their works’ perceived relationship with Things Fall Apart, raising some questions: How did first-generation Nigerian writers engage with Things Fall Apart, and to what extent can their colonial-themed novels be dismissed as imitations? In what ways do these textual connections differ from the avowed filiation and affiliation of more contemporary writers? How does one separate questions of influence and affiliation from those of derivativeness and imitation?
Part 3 discusses the life of Things Fall Apart beyond academic circles. Chapter 7 focuses on artistic interactions with the novel, including cover images and illustrations by artists Dennis Carabine and Uche Okeke in the 1960s African Writers Series editions. Chapter 8 zooms in on the novel’s two film adaptations: Jürgen Pohlad’s Bullfrog in the Sun (1971) and Adiele Onyedibia and Emma Eleanya’s TV series Things Fall Apart (1987), as well as further examples of the novel’s intertextual presence in other forms of popular culture, including drama, hip-hop, Onitsha Market writing, and advertising. Chapter 9 discusses the book’s circulation and popularity, examining questions of teaching, translation, and reception and arriving at a prediction of the book’s future.
This book is not only a history of the most famous African novel ever published. It is in many ways a tribute. As we pass the sixtieth anniversary of Things Fall Apart, the first since the demise of its author, it is a fitting moment to celebrate anew and to ask ourselves where the rain began to beat us . . . and if it ever ceased beating.
PART 1
Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre
1
The World of Stories
Chinua Achebe (b. 1930), the son of a Church Missionary Society catechist and teacher father and a convent-educated mother, spent his early years in his hometown of Ogidi, a few miles from Onitsha in southeastern Nigeria. Despite his parents’ avowed Christianity, he grew up surrounded by staunch adherents to traditional Igbo religion and culture and found himself navigating, almost from birth, “the dangerous potency” of this particular cultural crossroads, which counterpoised an outward allegiance to the new religion and colonial values espoused by his parents with a powerful attraction to the ancestral ways of life. Achebe was by no means unique in this regard, but he had qualities that set him apart from most other children and that would eventually enable him to make sense of his complex world and its constant state of flux in creative ways. The young Achebe was extraordinarily intelligent, and a great part of his intelligence manifested itself in his ease with language and passion for narrative: “first Igbo, spoken with eloquence by the old men of the village, and later English, which I began to learn at about the age of 8,” as he put it.
Books did not abound in Nigerian mission primary schools of the time, but Achebe’s father treasured the written word and lived surrounded by books, magazines, documents, and inscribed papers of every description. Apart from the Bible, the family’s modest library included an abridged version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and an Igbo adaptation of The Pilgrim’s Progress, which Achebe devoured, as well as such periodicals as the West African Churchman’s Pamphlet. As we will see, in just a few years’ time, Achebe would encounter an equally instructive mode of indigenous inscription, mbari art. But in these very early years, he spent considerable time reading the available books and musing on the many educational posters and advertisements with which his father decorated the walls. At this point, however, he was less taken with the world of literature and print culture than with the orality of his ancestors: “I did not know that I was