Things Fall Into Place

"Namely, a writer of our story."

'A New Kind of Writing'

What Chinua Achebe was to be, according to innumerable writers, scholars and admirers, was the father of modern African literature, a writer who would evoke the continent's true nature both for the world at large and for Africans themselves.

When Achebe says "our story," he explains, he means "the story of our meeting with Europe, and particularly the suffering that our people went through in that encounter, and the loss."

"No European writer could have written 'Things Fall Apart,' " says Ernest Emenyonu, who chairs the department of Africana studies at the University of Michigan at Flint. It was "a new kind of writing," for two reasons:

The first was the way Achebe made the colonizer's language his own. By incorporating Igbo speech patterns, proverbs, folk tales and beliefs, he invented an English that could "articulate African aesthetics and African poetics." The second was that he "explored the psychology of imperial conquest" and challenged Eurocentric views.

In other words: Part of what Africans suffered at European hands was the loss of control over their own narrative.

Achebe took back that narrative.

In interviews given a few years after "Things Fall Apart" was published, Achebe pointed to a key motivating factor in his decision to write the book: his outrage at encountering "Mister Johnson," a novel by the Anglo-Irishman Joyce Cary. The Nigerian title character, Achebe has said, seemed to him nothing but "an embarrassing nitwit," while Cary's portrait of Africa amounted to "a contagion of distaste, hatred and mockery."

"I said to myself, this is absurd," Achebe told fellow writers Wole Soyinka and Lewis Nkosi in a 1963 interview. "If somebody without any inside knowledge of the people he is trying to describe can get away with it, perhaps I ought to try my hand at it."

Achebe's "Mister Johnson" story is part of his legend, but he sometimes wishes he had never told it -- because while true, it's too simple a version of how he found his calling. "Even if Joyce Cary had not been born," he says, "I think what I did would still have been done."

The full story begins with a shy boy exploring his home town, recording information in what he calls "a mental notebook."

'The People of Nothing'

Achebe landed in the town of Ogidi at the age of 5 when his father, a fervent converted Christian, returned home after 30 years spent spreading the Gospel around Nigeria. As "people of the church," the Achebe family looked down on adherents of traditional Igbo religion, calling them "heathen" or "the people of nothing."