LiteratureBook · 1958
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
Okonkwo, a wrestler and yam farmer of standing in an Igbo village, has built his whole life out of terror of being thought weak like his father, and it is that rigidity rather than the British that finally breaks him. Achebe gives the village its own full religious and social life first, so that what the missionaries take apart is something the reader has already come to know from the inside.
Why you should read this
Achebe wrote this partly as a direct answer to European novels that portrayed Africa as static and voiceless, and it is often taught as the point where the African novel in English claims its own narrative ground. Standard starting point for African literature courses and postcolonial syllabi alike.
- Field
- Literature
- Form
- Fiction
- Published
- 1958
- Themes
- African LiteratureLiterature
