Chinua Achebe's THINGS FALL APART - The Review

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In this article, you're going to be seeing two things, The Book Land in pictures and the Book review in words,  you might have read this book a long time ago, or may never have, but this is the review and our thoughts as a club.
Read on and let us know what you think at the end of it.

The book 'Things Fall Apart' apart from being a revealing book, is a classic, it won tons of award and lots of nominations. It comprises of 25 chapters, and the story spans around a young man named Okonkwo, who at a tender age began to fend for his family 'he was forced to become an adult as a teenager by circumstances', in the words of a member.

It was written in a fully traditional Ibo setting, in a village called Umuofia. The men of this village were known for Farming Yams. the number of yams in your barn showed how much of a man you were, but Okonkwo was that and more. He was a wrestler, and at 18, he had defeated Amalinze the cat, who had stayed undefeated for seven years. He had a family, three wives But his success was fueled by one man, his father, Unoka. We are told that his father was 'lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow', which is quite strange because most villagers were known for their entrepreneurial spirit and since he couldnt provide for his family and was constantly in debt, okonkwo swore not to be anything like his father.

There was an instance where a man from Mbaino village killed a woman from Umofia, the wife of Ogbuefi Udo on the market day and so Mbaino had to choose between a war or restitution, they chose the latter, which came in form of a young boy named Ikemefuna and a virgin. the virgin to replace the widower whose wife was killed.
Ikemefuna came to live with Okonkwo and his family before the council of elders decide what to do with him.

Umofia had a sound justice system, they had the supreme court of the Nine Egwugwus believed by the villagers to be ancestral spirits, when in fact they were men of the village in disguise. 'Each of the nine Egwugwus represented a village of the clan and were feared by all villagers. Okonkwo was one of them, but throughout this book, when Okonkwo committed crimes, he was punished duly according to the laws of the land. and so we noticed that, though villagers, the had a sound justice system. Nobody lived above the law.

He committed crimes, and paid the price accordingly but one which stood out was when he killed  a boy mistakenly, during the funeral celebration of Ezeudu. it was a mistake but it earned his family and him and exile from Umofia for seven years and it was  after he left, the missionaries made their first and thus subsequent visits.

Okonkwo did well for himself in Umofia and in exile in Mbanta, where he stayed with his mothers kinsmen but he was a rigid man, but he had a soft spot for Ezinma the daughter of his third wife, the book tells us, 'He never stopped regretting that Ezinma was a girl' and for that Nwoye, his oldest son, disliked his principles, and so, in the same way Okonkwo rejected his fathers ways, his son did the same, if this pattern evolved because of the nature of the father/son relationship or it was more than a generational conflict, we would never know. but we know for sure that Nwoye chose the ways of the missionaries over the ways of the culture he had grown into.

The Missionaries, came gradually to survey the Lands and eventually, gradually convinced the villagers of the existence of a God above, which they said was bigger and better than the gods they worshiped and revered so much. There were two ministers who came. Mr Brown, patient, easy going and always ready to listen. Mr Smith, was the exact opposite, punished almost immediately and felt His God was not to be taken lightly with.

But when Okonkwo returned to Umofia, neither the church the white man had set up or the villagers appealed to him, everyone had gone weak in his opinion and had forgotten the sacred values of the land. And so, he spoke to his clansmen violently, and they listened to him with respect,  but they had destroyed the church of the Oyinbo and when the District Commissioner invited the leaders of Umofia to talk, they were arrested, treated like prisoners and asked to pay a fine of two hundred and fifty bags of cowries because their clan had destroyed the church.

Okonkwo was choked with hate while imprisoned and even more hate, when the fine was paid and they were released and so, when the messengers of the District Commissioner came to Umofia again, he drew his matchet thoughtlessly and 'it descended twice and the mans head lay beside his uniformed body' but the other messengers escaped which meant trouble for Umofia. Okonkwo, did not live to see the trouble he caused  because '...they came to the tree from which Okonkwo's body was dangling, and they stopped dead'. he had committed suicide, which an abominable act in Umofia.

Okonkwo, hated his father so much, but they both died similar deaths. abominable and the earth goddess could not receive them into the earth. 


The book has many sides, twists and turns but one thing we took from it was that, even though the White man thought they brought us civilization, they met us civilized. and the writer used the Ibo people to drive his point. They had a justice system that was fair. they toiled and tilled the land and harvested for food. And they looked up to the gods they believed in and they taught their children values.

Thank you for reading.
Special Thanks to Pintv Africa for our pictures and Chop Chop Eatout for the snacks
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