 Today, in world literature, we turn to the work of the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, with other African writers such as Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, in Gugu Wathiyongo, has made African writing known to an international audience. In this lecture, I focus on the novel Things Fall Apart, published in 1958. Here we see Achebe's selective, precise, and confident craftsmanship, his ability to create vibrant characters that provide a picture of the richness of pre-colonial life at the very moment that the center would no longer hold. Art is, and always was, at the service of man. Our ancestors created their myths and legends and told their stories for human purpose. So wrote the Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe. The first major African novelist to publish in English, Achebe, was raised by a Christian Igbo family. His novels explore the transformation, an African culture from pre-colonial times to an era of national independence. Things Fall Apart, 1958, is Achebe's first novel. It concerns the breakup of the traditional Igbo society during the colonial period. Characters of his novels include No Longer at Ease, 1960, Arrow of God, 1964, The Man of the People, 1966, and 1988's Ant Hills of the Savannah. In this lecture, I want to focus on Achebe's first novel. To better understand Things Fall Apart, we must first begin with the historical background to the novel, the world in which the novel is set. To begin, we must recall that the expansion of Western society reached its peak from 1880 to 1914. During that time, European nations consignured, almost in a frenetic sense, to send migrants, money, and manufactured goods around the world to create vast political empires abroad. This period of human expansionism had momentous consequences. The new imperialism was aimed directly at Africa, directly at Asia. Indeed, the most spectacular manifestation of imperialism is the conquest of Africa. The rapidity with which this colonization took place is even more dramatic when we remember that as late as 1880, only 10% of the African continent was controlled by Europeans. Then between 1880 and 1900, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy scrambled for African possessions. Important in this period was the rule of Leopold II of Belgium, who reigned from 1865 to 1909. He wrote, the sea bathes our coast, the world lies before us. Steam and electricity have annihilated distance, and all the non-appropriated lands on the surface of the globe can become the field of our operations, of our successes. Leopold sent the journalist, Henry M. Stanley, to the Congo to establish trading stations the rush for conquest was on. To lay down some rules of this game of imperialist competition, Premier Jules Ferry of France and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Germany arranged for an international conference on Africa in Berlin in 1884 and 1885. The conference established the principle that European claims for African territory had to rest on a principle of effective occupation. Frighteningly, of course, this principle meant that Europeans would push relentlessly into the interior regions from all sides and that no single European power, because it could not effectively occupy, could claim the entire continent. In the conquest was, of course, great and terrible violence. As evidenced in the 1898 battle at Amdurman, a city in central Sudan, here Muslim tribesmen armed with spears battled a British force under General Horatio H. Kitchener. The British were armed with recently invented machine guns. A young military officer, Winston Churchill, wrote that it was like a pantomime seen in a play. These extraordinary figures, he wrote, watch up one by one from the darkness of barbarism to the footlights of civilization, and their conquerors taking their possessions, forget even their names, nor will history record such trash. At the end of the battle of Qarari, 11,000 Muslim tribesmen were killed. Only 28 Britons had been killed and one million square miles were added to the British Empire. The British conquest of the Sudan exemplifies the general process of empire building in Africa. The fate of the Muslim forces at Amdurman was eventually inflicted on all Native peoples who resisted European rule. They were blown away by vastly superior military force. With this history in mind, we may now turn to the novel itself. In an earlier lecture on writing about literature, I made the point that often in European fiction a self-absorbed, self-interested individual marginalizes everything and everyone. The characters lived to seek, to strive solely for private and individual fulfillment. The hero backgrounds everything and everyone, sees everything in terms of what does and does not please. In an introduction to Nigerian literature, Bruce King argues that Achebe was the first Nigerian writer to successfully transmute the conventions of the novel, the European art form, into African literature. In an Achebe novel, European character is subordinated to the betrayal of communal life. European economy of form is replaced by an aesthetic appropriate to the rhythms of tribal life. Things fall apart centers around the culture of the Igbo. One of the three main ethnic groups in Nigeria, the Igbo of the dominant ethnic group in eastern Nigeria, numbering more than 10,000 in the early 1980s. The Igbo first encountered Christian missionaries in 1857. By 1900, the Igbo had come entirely under British rule. The most Igbo had adopted Christianity by the mid-20th century. Traditional Igbo, religion still flourishes. It is a loss of native culture that is important in Achebe's thought. He writes, most of the problems we see in our politics derive from the moment when we lost our initiative to other people, the colonizers. We have been subjected, we have subjected ourselves to this period during which we have accepted everything. Alien is good and practically everything local is inferior. The novel tells the story of the Igbo village during the late 1800s and one of its great men, a con quo. The novel is structured in three parts. The first part establishes life in the village of Yumofia. Indeed, perhaps the most striking achievement of the book is a vivid picture. It portrays the Igbo society, the end of the 19th century. As David Carroll suggests in his book on Achebe, here is a clan in full vigor of its traditional way of life, unperplexed by the present without nostalgia for the past. Through its rituals, the life of the community and the life of the individual emerged into significance and order. A con quo emerges as a strong central character, a fatally flawed in his anger. The son of a tribesman, a trifling tribesman, a con quo has become a great wrestler, a wealthy farmer, a husband, three wives, and a title holder among his people. At the end of part one, a con quo's rifle accidentally misfires and kills a boy during a funeral of a tribesman. According to tribal law, con quo must go into exile for seven years. The second part of the story finds a con quo in exile in his motherland. His life is in ruins, his plans to be warlord of one of the clans broken. His son, Nioye, has joined the missionaries and able to reconcile the actions of the clan that seemed cruel, murder of twins, the death of an innocent boy. This part of the novel chronicles the growth of the missionaries. As a con quo's farewell feast in elder statesman warns, I fear for you young people because you don't understand how strong is the bond of kinship, you do not know what it is to speak with one voice. Part two of the novel ends with the termination of a con quo seven years of exile. The third part concludes the novel as a con quo returns home to your mafia. To find the white men have brought their government with them. And have built a court where district commission and judge cases in ignorance. The white men is very clever, a con quo's friend tells him. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers and our clan can no longer act as one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart. It seemed, writes our Chebe, that the very soul of the tribe wept for a great evil that was coming, its own death. A con quo is enabled to accompany the changes in life that accompany colonialism and kills an African employed by the British. He then commits suicide, a sin against the tradition that he had so long clung. The final passage of the book is worth reading. Take down the bgati, the commissioner ordered the chief messenger and bring it and all these people to the court. Yes sir, the messenger said, saluting. The commissioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In the many years in which he had twirled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa, he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a district commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from a tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book he planned to write, he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court, he thought about that book. Every day brought him some 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. Well, perhaps not a whole chapter, but a reasonable paragraph at any rate. There was so much else to include, one must be firm in cutting out details. Here I've already chosen the title of the book after much thought, the pacification of the primitive tribes of the low Anaja. Instead of a full life, Akanko's life is summarized merely on a page and a book. At the end of the novel, the personal tragedy of Akanko and the public tragedy of the death of African culture emerged. And showing both society both before and after the coming of the white man, Achebe avoids the temptation to represent the past as idealized. He creates a sense of real life and real issues in the book. In his writings, particularly as his novels, Achebe has created a significant body of work in which he offers a close balance of contemporary African society and the forces that have shaped it. He represents a way of life that has almost disappeared and brings it back to us very vividly. Really in some ways he incorporates as well as goes beyond anthropology, sociology, political science, and his literature. Achebe is able to create something that deals with universal qualities. As Killiam writes in his study, Achebe's novels offer a vision of life which is essentially tragic, compounded of success and failure informed by knowledge and understanding. Relieved by humor and tempered sympathy imbued with an awareness of human suffering and the human capacity to endure. Sometimes his characters meet with success more often with defeat and despair. Through it all the spirit of man and the belief in possibility triumphs. Well, there is nevertheless the passing of a culture here. And the nature of that passage can best be understood, I think, by looking again to the title of the book and the place from which the title of the book comes and that is WB8's poem, The Second Coming. Let me read that poem to you now. Turning and turning in the wide Angiah, the falcon cannot hear the falcon. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood dim tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passion and intensity. Surely, some revelation is in hand. Surely, the second coming is at hand. The second coming, hardly are those words out when a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight. Somewhere in sands of the desert, a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun is moving its slow thighs while all about it reels shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again. But now I know that 20 centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle and what rough beast. It's our come round at last slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. In this poem, the Gaia, of course, is the spiritual unfolding of history. Simultaneously, it's the falcon's flight away from the center. The sphinx-like beast with his black eyes slouching towards Bethlehem is a sort of comprehensible horror but resistant to explicit interpretation, resistant to explicit interpretation, which makes it, I think, all the more horrible. Ultimately, the novel contributes to our understanding of education about Africa. For many of us, our picture of Africa comes from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Yet a chaby is sharply critical of this novelist treatment of Africa. And he writes, as he writes in hopes and impediments about Heart of Darkness. Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans than the story and that is to the natives. And at the point of the story is to ridicule Europe's civilizing mission in Africa. A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is milling the setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz, which is partly the point. Africa as setting and as backdrop, which eliminates the African human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield of all recognizable humanity into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance, and thus reducing Africa into the role of props for the breakup of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans, which this age long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether Renava would celebrate this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is no. In this desire to create, it seems to me the image of Africa and to try to recapture that and to try to get us to reconsider what it was that Conrad was producing for us. Indeed, manufacturing for us in a picture of Africa. It's worthwhile to turn to a 1989 interview that a Chebe published in the Missouri Review. The interviewer, Kay Benetti, asked a Chebe if he started thinking about becoming a writer in response to his colonial education in the university. This is how he answers. You can't explain why you become a writer, actually in one word. But you can certainly show strands of the story, and that certainly was one. The moment I realized in reading Heart of Darkness that I was not supposed to be part of Marlowe's crew sailing down the Congo to blend in the river, but I was one on the shore, jumping and clapping and making faces and so on, then I realized that was not me, and that that story had to be told again. Now I didn't realize this automatically. I read some of the colonial novels as a child without seeing anything happening, even identifying with the invading European. Literature can put you on the wrong side if you're not very careful, if you're too young. But the heroes are my people from abroad and the natives of the enemy that is a young weeder you take sides with the invaders of your country. Now in which you realize the trick that has been played on you, that's the moment I think that you decide, this is not my story. It happened with Conrad, it happened with Joyce Carey. Joyce Carey was even closer because in that novel, Mr. Johnson, the chief character is from the south, which is rather light Nigeria. I could not visualize this character. This was the first English department class at the university where I attended in Nigeria, which had just been founded. Every single student there had trouble with Mr. Johnson, the staff, which was all white, you know, English, Oxford, and so on. They thought this was marvelous. They told us this is the image of a poet. You're not supposed to see ordinary Africa here. So you have this buffoon, really, and he's supposed to be a really great African character. This book is supposed to be a great African novel. Our teachers met well. They wanted us to read something which related to us. That is why they included Joyce Carey's book in the syllabus. But they did do something for us because we said, oh, this is Nigeria. What happened to the Nigeria I would recognize? What has been written about that? This is one course of my inspiration. My Christian background was another, but even going further back, I think the traditional attitudes of the Ibo people, of African people, and storytelling, this was part of it too. In sum, what's the achievement of this great novel? What do we make of things fall apart based on what we know traditionally of how Africa is represented to us in literature, and what was clearly Achebe's point in writing the novel. And that was a sort of redemptive part for him to recreate the culture and to let us see it again. So what's the achievement of the novel? Well, I think aesthetically, it's clear that Achebe was the first Nigerian to successfully transmute the conventions of the novel, a European art form into African literature. European characters subordinated to the portrayal of community life. European economy of form is replaced by an aesthetic that's appropriate to the rhythms of tribal life. Achebe has made us re-examine the form of the novel itself. Culturally, of course, as we said, he's recreated a way of life. He made us look towards pre-colonial and colonial Africa as a civilization of culture, of nuance, and of strength. In reading Things Fall Apart, it is important to remember that Achebe insists on the social role of the African artist and the denial of the European preoccupation with individual experience. It is indeed interesting to note in passing that this is also the aim of many women writers. In his famous statement and definition of an African aesthetic, the novelist's teacher published in 1965, Achebe tells us, the writer cannot expect to be excused from the tasks of re-education and regeneration that must be done. In fact, he should march right in front. I, for one, would not wish to be excused. I would be quite satisfied if my novels, especially the ones 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. Perhaps what I write is applied art as distinct from pure art, but who cares? Art is important, and so is the education of the type I have in mind. Here indeed is one of the principal features which differentiates African artists from the European counterparts. African writers, as Achebe puts it, moved and had their beings in society and created their works for the good of society.