Things Fall Apart

Chapter 1
Okonkwo was tall and huge, and his bushy eyebrows and wide nose gave him a very severe look. Okonkwo was known for his various achievements, especially in wrestling. He hated the fact that his father was a failure and so tried to do everything the opposite of his father so that nobody would see a resemblance. He had slight stammer and whenever he was angry and could not get his words out quickly enough, he used his fists, and he had no patience with unsuccessful men. He had no patience with his father. The kola nut is only mentioned to be served on a disk and has to be broken by the guest as an honor. It is probably not explained in detail because Achebe wants the readers to discover the customs themselves. The titles in the village signified success because the more titles a man had, the more successful and wealthy they were likely to be, just like Okonkwo.

Chapter 2
Darkness held a vague terror for these people, even the bravest among them. Children were warned not to whistle at night for fear of evil spirits. A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string. The conflict with Mbaino was started because they had murdered a daughter of Umuofia. They decided that Okonkwo should go and receive the young lad of fifteen (Ikemefuna) and a virgin as a peaceful settlement to avoid war. The purpose was to sacrifice a man of the opposing village. Okonkwo overcompensates his father’s weaknesses by being very tough and trying to be the opposite of him. He is unusual according to his culture because he would rather work on his farm rather than celebrate in the festivals. He also broke a law in the week of peace. Okonkwo feels that men have to be very dominant over women. He dislikes Nwoye because he believes he is too weak.

Chapter 3
The priestess of Agbala symbolizes the power of women. Awareness of rank is observed in the drinking of the palm wine as the men with the most titles drink it first. Share-cropping is when someone gives seeds or land to someone else to plant and part of the profit is then given the that person. Women are the ones who truly celebrated the festival of the yams.

Chapter 4
Okonkwo’s virtue was that he had risen so suddenly from great poverty and misfortune to be one of the lords of the clan. Most people were struck by Okonkwo’s brusqueness in dealing with less successful men. At early age he had achieved fame s the greatest wrestler in all the land. It is said it was not luck but that his chi or personal god was good. But the Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says his chi says yes also. Okonkwo said yes very strongly’ so his chi agreed. Okonkwo was in charge of Ikemefuna and the boy feared him. But he later became popular in Okonkwo’s household, especially with the children. Even Okonkwo himself became very fond of the boy but only inwardly. Okonkwo broke the peace in the Week of Peace and so was punished, as was the custom, by Ezeani, the priest of the earth goddess. This shows that no matter how successful or powerful a man is, the laws are still directed to him as well. Some of the customs changed of over time because Ogbuefi Ezeudu said that the punishment for breaking the Peace of Ani had become very mild in their clan. Also that people who died during this time was not buried but cast into the Evil Forest.


Chapter 5
Okonkwo felt that the feasts were for women because of fertility. Somehow Okonkwo could never become as enthusiastic over feasts as most people. It is ironic that in a female fest, Okonkwo beats his second wife and nearly shot her when she tried to escape. Ekwefy was Okonkwo’s second wife and was married with someone else until she decided to run away to Okonkwo. She likes wrestling because that was what attracted her to Okonkwo. But she is often beaten by her husband too. She is considered a rebel because she tried to run away from Okonkwo when he pointed his gun at her.

Chapter 6
Chielo was the priestess of Agbala, the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves. In ordinary life Chielo was a widow with two children. Anyone seeing Chielo in ordinary life would hardly believe she was the same person who prophesized when the spirit of Agbala was upon her. She plays a pivotal role in their culture because it is ironic how she is the priestess of Agbala in a man-ruled culture. In this culture, man is believed to be superior and Chielo is the prophet of a goddess.



Chapter 7
Nwoye was pleased when he was sent by his mother or another of his father’s wives to do difficult and masculine tasks in the home, like splitting wood, or pounding food. Okonkwo was inwardly pleased at his son’s development, and he knew it was due to Ikemefuna. Okonkwo wanted Nwoye to grow tough and capable of ruling his household when he was dead and gone to join the ancestors. He wanted his son to be a prosperous man, having enough in his barn to feed the ancestors with regular sacrifices. Also wanted him to be able to control his women-folk. Also wanted him to hear his “masculine stories of violence and bloodshed” instead of the stories he heard from his mother. When the locusts were descending on the village, everyone got very excited and joyful. Many people went out with baskets trying to catch them, but they had to wait until nightfall. Everyone filled his bags and pots with locusts and the next morning; they were roasted in clay pots and then spread in the sun until they became dry and brittle. And for maydays this rare food was eaten with solid palm-oil. Okonkwo is asked not to take part in the killing of Ikemefuna because he was like a dad to him. The y had to kill him because the Oracle of the Hills and Caves had pronounced it. Odondwo probably finished killing Ikemefuna because he wanted to get over with it quickly. He also probably did not want to appear weak to the other men.


Chapter 8
Okonkwo’s attitude toward Enzinma was that he wished she was a boy since he thought she could have been a better son than Nwoye. It may depend on how it is viewed to judge if the custom of the bridegroom’s family paying the substantial wealth in cash or goods for the privileged of marrying a young woman. It may tend to make women more valuable since the man’s family has to do everything for her, but it can also mean that women are inferior to men and so the man’s family has to do everything. Young women may have started to marry on their teens because at that time they are capable of getting pregnant. The white man was introduced by comparing him to a chalk since it is also white. They also said that they heard white men had not toes, since a white man named Amadi was a leper.

Chapter 9
Enzinma was an only child and the center of Ekwefi’s world. Very often it was Enzinma who decided what food her mother should prepare. Ekwefi even gave her such delicacies as eggs, which children were rarely allowed to eat because such food tempts them to steal. The treatment of the obanje signifies a superstition toward children, believing some are born with an evil spirit. This can mean that children are viewed as little devils.

Chapter 10
The egwugwu ceremony was one in which the spirits of the ancestors would arise. There was nine and each represented a village of the clan. Women fled as soon as the egwugwu cam in sight. The women have some suspicions that it might even be their husbands that pretend to be the spirits but don’t say anything because they are prohibited from doing so. The main function of the ceremony was to keep order in the villages. It was some sort of court. Evil Forest refutes the argument of Uzowulu by stating the fact his wife couldn’t of been unfaithful because no kind of man would sleep with a pregnant woman. In this problem, it was the brothers of Mgbafo (the wife) beat Uzowulu up and took their sister back home with them. Family involvement in marriage man be good to check on the couple and try to fix any problems. But it could also become bad because some families force their siblings to marry someone by force just because of some interest.

Chapter 11
The moral of the fable of the tortoise may be to teach the kids that in their culture cheating and lying or taking advantage of people by outsmarting them are not permitted. It may be a foreshadow that the missionaries are going to attempt to take everything in the village just as the tortoise but everyone will unite to take them out like the birds. The incident with the priestess of Agbala taking Enzinma with her shows how sometimes the people do not wish to obey the laws, even if it comes from a god. Ekwefi was warned by the priestess that she should not follow or she would experience the wrath of Agbala but Enzinma overcomes the fear of divine and decides to follow her anyway.

Chapter 12
Everybody was invited to the uri of a daughter of Obierika, who was Okonkwo’s friend. The bride’s mother was o do her difficult but happy task of cooking for a whole village with the help of Obierika’s compound. A lot of relatives arrived and expected to have a good time. Especially the men, who were anxious to drink the palm wine. All the relatives were in charge that the celebration would not go wrong – the y counted the pots of palm wine as they were brought in. When the women retired, Obierika presented kola nuts to his in-laws. His elder brother broke the first one. “Life to all of us,” he said as he broke it. “And let there be friendship between your family and ours.”

Chapter 13
The one-handed egwugwu carrying a basket full of water appeared as the people were performing the ritual. H calls on the dead Ezeudu and tells him “If you had been poor in your last life I would have asked you to be rich when you come again. But you were rich. If you had been a coward, I would have asked you to bring courage. But you were a fearless warrior. If you had died young, I would have asked you to get life. But you lived long. So I shall ask you to come again the way you came before. If you death was the death of nature, go in peace. But if a man cause it, do not allow him a moment’s rest” This seems to portray an act of revenge. When Okonkwo accidentally shot the boy in the heart everyone was shocked. Violent deaths were frequent, but nothing like that had ever happened. The only course open to Okonkwo was to flee form the clan because it was a crime against the earth goddess to kill a clansman, and a man who committed it must flee from he land and was allowed to return in seven years because it had been accidental. After he left, his houses were set on fire, his red walls were demolished, and his animals were killed and barn was destroyed. It was to clean the land, which Okonkwo had polluted with the blood of a clansman.

Chapter 14
Part 1 introduces us to the intact and functioning culture in Umuofia. It may have had its faults, and it accommodated deviants like Okonkwo with some difficulty, but it still worked as an organic whole. It is in Part 2 that things begin to fall apart (title of book). Okonkwo’s exile in Mbanta is not only a personal disaster, but it removes him from his home village at a crucial time so that he returns to a changed world which can no longer adapt to him. Okonkwo’s life had been ruled by a great passion –to become one of the lords of the can. That had been his life-spring. And he all but achieved it. Then everything had been broken. He had been cast out of his clan like a “fish onto a dry, sandy beach, panting”. The significance of Okonkwo being compared to a fish out of water may mean that Okonkwo’s possibilities of accomplishing his dream had just ran out of gasp of air and so will die. Note the value placed on premarital chastity in the engagement ceremony. In many African cultures virginity is not an absolute requirement for marriage but it is highly desirable and normally greatly enhances the value of the bride-price that may be paid. Thus families are prone to assert a good deal of authority over their unmarried daughters to prevent early love affairs. The fact that Okonkwo couldn’t answer the questions about women and especially mothers that his uncles Ucnendu asked him probably means that Okonkwo didn’t really consider women as reasonable human beings. His uncle then tells him “A man belongs to his fatherland when things are good and life is sweet. But when there is sorrow and bitterness he finds refuge in his motherland. Your mother is there to protect you. She is buried there. And that is why we say that mother is supreme.” Pg. 134

Chapter 15
Tree white men and a great army of men surrounded the market of Abame. They must have used a powerful “medicine” to make themselves invisible until the market was full. And they began to shoot. Everybody was killed, except the old and the sick who were at home and a handful of men and women whose chi were wide awake and brought them out of that market. Their clan was then completely empty. Event he sacred fish in their mysterious lake had fled and the lake turned the color of blood. A great evil had come upon their land as the Oracle had warned. The villagers referred to the bikes the white men were using as “iron horse”. Although the people of Abame acted rashly, they had a good deal of insight into the significance of the arrival of the whites. Note how the Africans treat the white man’s language as mere noise; a mirror of how white colonizers treated African languages. Okonkwo had heard stories about white men who made the powerful guns and the strong drinks and took slaves away across the seas, but no one had thought the stories were true. In the final exchange with Okonkwo Obierika is good-naturedly refusing to accept Okonkwo’s thanks by joking with him (told him to kill one of his sons for the favor).

Chapter 16
The British followed a policy in their colonizing efforts of designation local “leaders” to administer the lower levels of their empire. In Africa these were known as “warrant chiefs.” But the man they chose wee often not the real leaders, and the British often assumed the existence of a centralized chieftainship where none existed. Thus the new power structures meshed badly with the old. Similarly the missionaries had designated as their contact man an individual who lacked the status to make his respected by his people. Nwoye probably became a Christian because his father made him feel like an outcast. As a Christian, he felt fore like himself. Note how Achibe inverts the traditional dialect humor of Europeans, which satirizes the inability of natives to speak proper English by having the missionary mangle Ibo. The first act of the missionaries which evokes a positive response in some of the Ibo was when they were fascinated when the missionaries burst into song. It was a story of brothers who lived in darkness and in fear, ignorant of the love of God. It told of now sheep out on the hills, away from the gates of God and from the tender shepherd’s care. Achebe focuses on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the notoriously least logical and most paradoxical basic belief in Christianity. The belief undermines the missionaries’ attempt to discredit the traditional religion because it claims that all religions are false except for Christianity. This new religion appeals to Nwoye because the hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his soul _ the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemifuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul.

Chapter 17
The granting of the missionaries of a plot in the Evil Forest backfires because they thought that the missionaries would not accept it and they actually did make use of it to build the church. Every clan and village had its “evil forest.” In it wee buried all those who died of the really evil deseases, like leprosy and small pox. It was also the dumping ground for the potent fetishes of great medicine men when they died. An “evil forest” was, therefore, alive with sinister forces and powers of darkness. The inhabitants of Mbanta expected them to be all dead within four days. They were puzzled when many days and not one had died. Not long, they even got their first conversts. The metaphor in the second to last sentence (Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.) means that imperialism causes the village to become impotent in a sense that they lose they identity and customs. They are also under the mercy of the white men.

Chapter 18
The outcaste osu are introduced in this chapter. Achebe had probably not mentioned them earlier to demonstrate how imperialism and the changing of customs gave great power to the church since they gained support from them. It starts with the outcastes being converted first and from then the church just keeps gaining power until it is in control of the whole village. In India the lowest outcastes were among the first to convert to faiths which challenged traditional Hinduism; and something similar happens in the story.



Chapter 19
Traditional Umuofian custom can welcome back a mistaking member (Okonkwo) once he has paid for his crime. In may cultures Okonkwo would be treated as a pariah, but this culture has ways of accommodating such a person without destroying him, and in fact encouraging him to give of his best. The final speaker says that Christianity is a threat in that it turns people from their family. “An abominable religion has settled among you. A man can now leave his father and his brothers. He can curse the gods of his fathers and his ancestors, like a hunter’s dog that suddenly goes mad and turns on his master. I fear for you; I fear for the clan.” Pg. 167

Chapter 20
Okonkwo’s relationship to the newcomers is intensified by the fact that he has a very great deal at stake in maintaining the old ways. All his hopes and dreams are rooted in the continuance of the traditional of the traditional culture. The fact that he has not bee able gradually to accustom himself to the new ways helps to explain his extreme reaction. The missionaries have brought British colonial government with them. The missionaries were often viewed as agents of imperialism. There is a common saying common to Native Americans and Africans alike which goes like this: “Before the white man came, we had the land and they had the Bible. Now we have the Bible and they have the land.” The British courts crashed some of the values of the village because people who had thrown away their twins were imprisoned and also those who had molested the Christians. They were beaten in the prison by the kotma (court messengers) and made to work every morning clearing the government compound and fetching wood for the white Commissioner and the court messengers. Some of the men that were even held as prisoners were even those who had titles, who should be above such mean occupation. They were grieved by the indignity and mourned for their neglected farms.

Chapter 21
Some of the villagers, even those who are not converts to Christianity welcome the British because although they had brought a lunatic religion, the had also built a trading store and for the first time palm-oil and kernel became things of great price, and much money flowed into Umuofia. And even in the matter of religion there was a growing feeling that there might be something in it after all, something vaguely akin to method I the overwhelming madness. It was in part of Mr. Brown convincing people that the religion got more power. After many people came to learn in his school, the people of the village began to change their mind about it since Brown’s school produced quick results. A few months in it were enough to make one a court messenger or even a court clerk. Those who stayed linger became teachers; and from Umuofia laborers went forth into the Lord’s vineyard. The missionaries try to refute what they consider worship with the simplistic argument that the animist gods are only wooden idols; however the villagers are perfectly aware that the idol is no the god in a literal sense, any more that eh sculpture of Christ on the cross in a Christian church is God. This sort of oversimplification was a constant theme of Christian arguments against traditional faiths throughout the world as the British assumed that the natives were fools pursuing childish beliefs who needed only a little enlightenment to be converted. Mr. Brown here learns better. It is worth noting that Achebe, like his fellow writer Wole Soyinka, was raised a Christian; but both rejected the faith and have preferred to affirm certain aspects of traditional beliefs in their own lives. Akunna shrewdly senses that the head of the Church is in England rather than in heaven. Note how the phrase “falling apart” is in the last sentence of the chapter.

Chapter 22
Reverend James Smith condemned openly Mr. Brown’s policy of compromise and accommodation. He saw things as black and white. And black was evil. He saw the world as a battlefield in which the children of light were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of darkness. Caused some controversy because he saw many of the of the traditional things that the people did as being very bad, like mutilating children that are thought to be possessed by the obanje. At the end of the chapter, the egwugwu spirits burn down the church that Mr. Brown had built.

Chapter 23
The commissioner claims that they wanted the clan of the village to cooperate because they had brought a peaceful administration to all of them so that they would be happy. If any man mistreated another, they would help. He says that the actions of molesting the messengers must not happen in the dominion of his queen, the most powerful ruler in the world. It can be inferred that the commissioner says that the motive of the British to colonize the Africans was to “civilize” them.


Chapter 24
Once again Okonkwo uses his machete rashly, bringing disaster to his head, killing a missionary by cutting his head off. But he could be viewed as a deviant hero defending his people’s way of life. Okonkwo used his machete once the white missionary said “The white man whose power you know too well has ordered this meeting to stop”. This could be viewed as heroic in the sense that he would not give in to the missionaries’ dominance. But it was not seen like that in his clan. Okonkwo knew right away that Umuofia would not go to war against the missionaries because they had let the other messengers escape. They had broken into tumult instead of action. He heard voices asking: “Why did he do it?” so he then just went away.

Chapter 25
Okonkwo probably killed himself because he knew that Umuofia would not have war with the imperialists. He saw everyone as being turned to cowards compared to the time in which there were great warriors like him. He could not take the fact that his clan had refused to save themselves from the domination of the imperialists by engaging battle. He had lost hope in life and knew that he would never be able to become a successful man in a new world in which titles do not mean much anymore.