A Taker of Heads

Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), was an early and spectacular part of the flowering of West African literature after independence from colonial rule. It seemed, perhaps especially to a South African like me living under increasingly draconian controls, a wonderful illustration of what liberation might mean. Now, I suspect, it is one of those books which almost everyone knows about but very few people other than students actually read.

I am a reader, not a collector: the few rarities I have been given or have gathered are mainly scattered in the bookshelves, along with tattered paperbacks and rejects from libraries. However, one small batch of beautifully hand-set and hand-printed slim volumes sits safely protected from dust, moths and grandchildren in a glass-fronted bookcase; they are some of the books and pamphlets published in Nigeria, mainly by the Mbari Press at Ibadan University, in the late 1950s and early ’60s: Wole Soyinka’s Three Plays; John Pepper Clark’s Song of a Goat (a play) and his Poems; Lenrie Peters’s Poems; Christopher Okigbo’s Heavensgate; George Awoonor Williams’s Rediscovery and Other Poems; and others. What high hopes we had then, before the Biafran War, the tribal conflicts in Rwanda and Burundi, the civil war in the Congo, and the hollowing-out of Zimbabwe. Even so, some of us have not yet succumbed to ‘Afropessimism’ but hope that the example of South Africa in preferring forgiveness to retribution may yet herald an African Renaissance. So I came back to the self-imposed task of rereading Things Fall Apart with a degree of trepidation. Would it seem dated? Partial in its desire ‘to set the colonial record straight’? Sentimental about precolonial history? In Morning yet on Creation Day, his book of critical essays (1975), Achebe had written that he would be ‘quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them’. In fact Things Fall Apart is not merely a diatribe against colonialism, nor even a black writer’s reply to what he sees as the patronizing of blacks in Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson or, worse still, the dumping on Africa of a European horror of the Other, as Achebe perceives Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness to be. It seems to me now an even greater novel than when I first read it – truthful, sometimes even savage in its ironies, and genuinely a tragedy, in the fullest sense, one of those rare books that gets better as it gets older. The central figure is Okonkwo, a big man (‘tall and huge’, Achebe calls him), a skilful wrestler, a warrior adept in local wars, a taker of heads, determined above all else to avoid following the example of his father, Unoka, who would rather play his flute and drink with his neighbours than go to war or tend his farm. However, Okonkwo’s life is dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness: ‘It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself . . .’ It is this that leads him to the first stage in his downfall. To prevent a war after the killing of a member of the clan, the offending village has given the rival village of Umuofia a virgin and a young man, Ikemefuna, whose fate it is to be sacrificed in due course; the virgin has been married off, the young man has become almost a son to Okonkwo, on his way to becoming one of the great men of the clan. When the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves pronounces that the time has come for Ikemefuna to be sacrificed, Okonkwo is warned to stay away, because the boy has learned to see him as a father; Okonkwo doesn’t, because he is afraid he will be thought a weakling. Instead, he joins the gang of men who follow Ikemefuna through the bush to the place of sacrifice; and when the terrible moment comes, even though Ikemefuna calls out to his father for help, it is Okonkwo who first strikes him down. Okonkwo suffers misfortune as well as having the flaws of character which misfortune will expose. At the funeral of one of the great men of the village, Okonkwo’s gun explodes and kills a 16-year-old boy. The punishment for killing a clansman, even inadvertently, is to spend seven years in exile. Okonkwo has at once to uproot his three wives and eleven children and go to live in the village from which his mother originally came; the morning after the accident, the men of Umuofia destroy his compound, burning his huts and barn, and killing his animals. ‘It was the justice of the earth goddess.’ Although Okonkwo manages to re-establish himself as a person of some consequence, beginning life anew without the vigour and enthusiasm of youth is hard, ‘like learning to become left-handed in old age . . . His life had been ruled by a great passion – to become one of the lords of the clan. That had been his life-spring. And he had all but achieved it. Then everything had been broken. He had been cast out of his clan like a fish on to a dry, sandy beach, panting.’ Now more misfortunes arrive to prey on his flaws. While Okonkwo and his family are in exile, the first missionary arrives in Abame, a neighbouring village, a white man riding an iron horse. Because the Oracle predicts that his coming will mean doom for the village, the missionary is killed and his bicycle chained to the sacred tree, lest it return to the other white men to warn them. The colonial authorities wreak their inevitable revenge. And so the tragedy runs its course. By the time Okonkwo is allowed to return, his eldest son Nwoye – alienated by the sacrifice of the boy he had treated as a brother, Ikemefuna – has become a Christian, has been renamed Isaac (Achebe’s own baptismal name – his parents were Christian converts – is Albert) and has been sent by the missionaries to train as a teacher. Mr Brown, the first of the missionaries at Umuofia, is a wise man who accommodates himself and his mission to many of the local customs, but Okonkwo cannot bear the changes which afflict his clan: he ‘was deeply grieved. And it was not just a personal grief. He mourned for the clan . . . and he mourned for the warlike men of Umuofia, who had so unaccountably become soft like women.’ When Mr Brown is replaced by the fundamentalist Reverend James Smith and his over-zealous acolyte, Enoch, things get even worse. In anger, Enoch pulls the mask off one of the nine egwugwu, the disguised holy figures in whom the spirits of the ancestors reside; and the villagers take their revenge for the desecration by burning down the church. ‘For the first time in many years Okonkwo had a feeling that was akin to happiness . . . It was like the good old days, when a warrior was a warrior.’ After the intervention of the District Commissioner, and the arrest and detention of the six leaders of Umuofia – including Okonkwo – the village is ordered to pay a fine to get their leaders released. It does so – and then, when the next step is being considered by a mass meeting of the villagers, Okonkwo takes matters into his own hands and, ‘trembling with hate, unable to utter a word’, kills one of the court messengers who have come to declare the meeting illegal. In the tumult that follows, he realizes that the village will not support him. There is only one thing left for him to do, and he does it. Part of the power of the novel comes from its brevity and from the fact that its perspective is almost entirely that of a tribal society. There are no apologies for the ways of the clan. This is simply how things were. Yet irony is a powerful device throughout the novel. Read it simply, and one will misread it. This is Okonkwo: ‘No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man.’ This is his son: ‘Nwoye knew it was right to be masculine and to be violent, but somehow he still preferred the stories that his mother used to tell.’ The style is mainly unadorned, although local proverbs lace the text, and Achebe manages to create a sense of the formalities of Ibo conversation by using an old-fashioned, fully syntactic prose for almost all the direct speech of the villagers. (He also gets his revenge on those who render the speech of Africans as pidgin by satirizing the way in which even the black missionaries mangle Ibo: one of them always manages to render the word for ‘myself ’ as ‘my buttocks’.) The last chapter is told almost entirely from the point of view of the unnamed District Commissioner, and the last paragraph of the novel is inside his head:

As he walked back to the court he thought about [the book that he planned to write] . . . Every day brought him new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

Achebe is too honest a writer to pretend that everything the missionaries brought to Africa was bad; how could he not believe in his own education, after all? Nor is he simple-minded enough to think pre-colonial society – with its honour killings and sacrificial practices – Edenesque. Part of what he does as a writer is to re-balance the history of Africa; but the reasons for thinking Things Fall Apart a great and enduring tragic novel are bigger than the merely historical.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 22 © C. J. Driver 2009