A Short History of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Terri Ochiagha

at Umuahia Government College eventually became creative writers: Chike Momah, Chukwuemeka Ike, and, until his untimely death in the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War, the modernist poet Christopher Okigbo. Few writers have been privileged to have such an immersion in the world of literature at such a young age. And literature was to reign supreme on the next stage of his journey.

      In 1948—exactly ten years before the publication of Things Fall Apart—Achebe’s outstanding success in the Cambridge School Certificate examination secured him a major government scholarship to study medicine at University College, Ibadan. University College had opened its doors in January of that year and operated as a constituent college of the University of London under the principalship of Professor Kenneth Mellanby, with an academic staff consisting mostly of early-career British academics. Mellanby was emphatic that the college was to maintain the same academic standards as its metropolitan counterpart, but certain allowances—which would have been unimaginable at government colleges like Umuahia—were made to reflect the changing times. Anticolonial nationalists, for instance, found a ready platform at University College. And as we will see, African religions were not excluded, but held up to academic scrutiny.

      In his first year, Achebe set out to enjoy the university’s vast intellectual possibilities. But things went slightly amiss. The problem did not lie in his intellectual capabilities but in the fact that, as he eloquently put it years later, he “was abandoning the realm of stories and they would not let [him] go.”⁴ Despite the risks and difficulties—he lost his scholarship and the attendant privileges—Achebe decided to start afresh in the arts faculty, enrolling to study English, history, and theology.⁵

      In his English courses, Achebe was reunited with many of the writers he had read during his Umuahia school years. He also discovered many others. Four of these “new” writers would significantly shape his creative vision. Two were striking exemplars of the tradition of imperial narratives that Achebe had encountered at Umuahia: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson (1939). The first is an aesthetically outstanding novel, part of the high modernist canon. The latter is not as highly regarded today, but received a degree of acclaim in its time.

      The English faculty at University College thought that the inclusion of Irish writers in the literature syllabus was, in light of the colonial situation, interesting, and it was under that rubric that Achebe read Mister Johnson for Eric Robinson’s class. As the novel was set in northern Nigeria, Robinson thought that the geographical proximity might pique the students’ interest. Cary’s novel revolves around the rise and fall of Johnson, a Nigerian clerk so caught up in his Anglophilic reveries that he fails to see the stark realities that bring about his tragic end. According to Ben Obumselu, then in Achebe’s class (and who eventually became a renowned literary critic), Robinson “was trying to recall old Africa, but Cary had no knowledge of old Africa except what he read.”⁶ What he ended up recalling was something else altogether. It appears the students had already read Heart of Darkness, and the discursive continuities with Conrad’s image of Africa were glaringly obvious. The students, unanimous in their distaste for the debased representation of Nigeria that emerged in Cary’s novel, lost their colonial blinkers. Achebe, as we have seen, had savored, with great relish, a number of imperial novels and adventures at the Umuahia Government College, and now he had an epiphany: “In the end I began to understand there is such a thing as absolute power over a narrative. Those who can secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much as they like.” He decided that “that the story we had to tell could not be told for us by anyone else no matter how gifted or well intentioned.”⁷