I must appropriately start my rant by paying tribute to Chinua Achebe who has died at the ripe age of 82 in Boston, USA. It was the announcement of his death that nudged me to reach once more to his book "Things Fall Apart" which I read at school as a set book for literature alongside other African writers like Elechi Amadi (Concubine), Ngugi wa Thiong'o (A Grain of Wheat), John Ruganda (The Burdens, The Floods) and Meja Mwangi (Carcase for Hounds) interspersed were other African and Kenyan writers Grace Ogot (Land Without Thunder, The Promised Land), Barbara Kimenye (Moses Series) under the African Writers Series. We carried the books into church in between hymn books and bibles to keep us awake in between long sermons.
Achebe said that storytelling "is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail—the bravery, even, of the lions." Achebe tells his stories so that we might avoid the 'danger of the one sided story'...the story that depicts Africans as lazy, primitive, without gods & religion, traditions, devoid of culture, poetry and music...a war mongering & primitive race. It was inorder to avoid this that I bought the book for my children - of the Harry Potter generation - and forced them to enjoy the novels that I too enjoyed in my youth. Like them my early years were spent reading Aesop's Fables, the Brothers Grimm, Enid Blyton's Famous Five & Secret Seven series, I fell in love with my brother's Hardy Boys & Nancy Drew characters...stories replete with blue eyed boys and blonde girls. I wished I were the Sleeping Beauty, the Princess & the Pea, Rapunzel plus many other heroines in those novels. I discovered African Writers belatedly in my teenage years and was enthralled that there was another story with kinky haired girls.,..with names like Ezinma & Eneka that were there before Stacy & Stephanie. Before spaghetti carbonara...there was foofoo, egusi leaves & dried fish plus other delicacies to water our pallets. I feel nostalgic as I read Achebe's 'Things fall apart' which fills the gap created by the misfortune that I did not grow up with grandmothers reciting fables around the fire. I am grateful that I can compare and contrast Hardy & Shakespeare with Ngugi wa Thiong'o & Chinualogu Achebe.
It is difficult for me to say what moves me most about "Things Fall Apart". Not sure whether it is the storyline or the manner in which the tale is told. I enjoy reading Achebe even as he spews out the names of his characters. I am slightly pleased that Okoli dies after killing the python...afterall the gods were still able to fight there own battles...This reminds me of Romans 12:9 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord' Things Fall Apart is tragic but I feel proud that the African is depicted as hardworking, full of fun, resilient, orderly, proud etc. I find it difficult to reconcile this depiction of the African race to the current one of hunger, famine, war mongering and illegal immigration. The reader cannot but be drawn to Okonkwo despite his weaknesses and feel for his misfortunes. At the end of it, the despondency he felt was so great when his center could not hold. Okonkwo though strong was weak and it is a pity that one cannot find firm answers in "Things Fall Apart". On the one hand the sages tell us that "when a man says yes, his chi also says yes" yet on the other they also remind us "that a man cannot rise beyond the destiny of his chi". Must we then accept fate as it comes or fight against it to the death like the musketeers of yore?
I have read the trilogy of "Things Fall Apart", "No Longer at Ease" and "Arrow of God" and I must say that Chinua Achebe and his peers are for me what Kwame Nkrumah & Julius Nyerere were for panafricanists. I must digress to think about my Nigerian colleague who always started his interventions with..."my people say.......". He exasperated me once and I quipped that "we, too, have people". However, as I re-read Achebe in my adulthood, I marvelled at the ease in which "proverbs" and "wise sayings" were part of any conversation...I must remember to use the tongue in cheek saying that 'Since men have learnt to shoot without missing, Eneke the bird has learnt to fly without perching' . Today when someone said on a facebook conversation that ...'a mother of twins must have impartial breasts'...I couldn't help but smile. Afterall proverbs are the palm wine with which words are eaten,
I have read the trilogy of "Things Fall Apart", "No Longer at Ease" and "Arrow of God" and I must say that Chinua Achebe and his peers are for me what Kwame Nkrumah & Julius Nyerere were for panafricanists. I must digress to think about my Nigerian colleague who always started his interventions with..."my people say.......". He exasperated me once and I quipped that "we, too, have people". However, as I re-read Achebe in my adulthood, I marvelled at the ease in which "proverbs" and "wise sayings" were part of any conversation...I must remember to use the tongue in cheek saying that 'Since men have learnt to shoot without missing, Eneke the bird has learnt to fly without perching' . Today when someone said on a facebook conversation that ...'a mother of twins must have impartial breasts'...I couldn't help but smile. Afterall proverbs are the palm wine with which words are eaten,
The beginning of the book is a poem by W.B. Yeats from which the title derives.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer,
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is losed upon the world.
The question that behoves an answer is whether the finale is when things fall apart or is the end when anarchy is then losed upon the earth as a result of the things that fell apart when the center could not hold?
This ending of the book is apt as the Commissioner muses about the title of the his upcoming book:- 'The Pacification of the the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger'. I wonder whether the tribes have been truly pacified...or whether those tribe were truly primitive.
