Things Fall Apart (Part 2) #17

Hi I’m John Green, this is Crash Course Literature, and today we continue
our discussion of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Mr. Green, Mr. Green! I
can’t even believe we’re spending two weeks on this book. Like, it’s about as
long as a Babysitter’s Club book. Okay, couple things, Me From the Past.
First off, the length of a book is not directly proportional to its quality.
Secondly, I could do, like, five Crash Course Literatures on Babysitter’s Club
26, Claudia and the Sad Goodbye. Trying to pretend that you didn’t like The
Babysitter’s Club so you’ll seem cool - I see through you, Me From the Past!
So, Things Fall apart is interesting on a lot of levels, and part of that is due to
the historical contexts of the story. And I did say contexts, plural. Because
it’s a historical novel about the colonization of Africa in the late 19th
century, but it was written in the late 1950s, just as European colonial
powers were giving up their colonies. And like the novel, Chinua Achebe
lived between these two worlds. So let’s start there. [Theme Music] So
Chinua Achebe was born Albert Chinuamaluga Achebe in 1930, about eighty
years after the first missionaries arrived in Igboland. His father had
converted to Christianity, hence the Albert, through one of the missionary
schools in Nigeria and became an evangelist for the church. But the rest of
Achebe’s family adhered to the traditional Igbo culture and religious
traditions, which meant Achebe spent his childhood at “the crossroads of
culture,” as he once put it. By the age of eight, he could read in Igbo and in
English. He read Shakespeare and missionary texts one day and sat in Igbo
storytelling circles the next. And he wrote Things Fall Apart to “retell the
story of my encounter with Europe in a way acceptable to me,” and to
counter the traditional European view of Africa and Africans with a human
picture that matched the complexity of actual humans. And with Okonkwo’s
story, Achebe grounds the reader really deeply in the ancient Igbo life and
culture before there’s even any mention of missionaries. So we get a clear
look at the structures and beliefs and traditions that held the community
together before Europeans arrived. Except, of course, it’s also not a clear
look because one, we’re reading fiction. More importantly, we’re reading
fiction written a hundred years after European contact. Anyway, early on in
Things Fall Apart, we hear that in Igboland, “The land of the living was not
far removed from the domain of the ancestors. There was coming and going
between them, especially at festivals and also when an old man died,
because an old man was very close to the ancestors. A man’s life from birth
to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and
nearer to his ancestors.” So Achebe shows us a functioning society with
institutions like the tribal council that settle disputes and bring order to
Igboland. Now these institutions may not be recognizable to the Westerners
who showed up for the palm oil, but they had functioned for thousands of
years. And then, when British missionaries and colonial governors arrive on
the scene, they fail to understand these institutions and they try to replace
them with their own forms of religion and government. But one of the
fascinating things about this novel is that it doesn’t unambiguously condemn
or praise either worldview, right? Like, there are clearly problems with both
systems of justice. And that really runs counter to the European
essentializing of pre-colonial African lives, which usually imagines them
either as uncivilized savages or else as these innocents living in an Edenic
utopia. So Okonkwo is in exile when the Europeans first show up in the
story, but when he returns to his transformed community, he urges
resistance. But his friend Obierka responds sadly, “It is already too late. Our
own men and our sons have joined the ranks of the stranger. They have
joined his religion and they help to uphold his government.” This is of course
particularly interesting considering that it was written in the context of a
decolonizing late 1950s Africa. So how did the British Empire end up coming
to power in Igboland? Well, let’s go to the Thought Bubble. So in the 19th
century, when the events of this story took place, all the great European
powers were busily setting up colonial empires across the world. These
overseas colonies were a real win/win for Europe, as they not only furnished
raw materials to feed the manufacturing economies back home, they also
acted as new markets in which to sell industrial goods. So colonies were
popular. They were so popular, in fact, that the German Chancellor
organized a conference to divide up Africa among the Europeans, in order to
avoid any wars over the continent. They would also have the happy side
effect of spreading the so-called Three C’s: commerce, Christianity, and
civilization. So, at the Berlin conference of 1885, Africa’s fate was decided.
Oh, also no one from Africa was invited to the conference, naturally. In West
Africa, much of the colonial trade had been in slaves prior to 1807, and most
of that horrifying business was done on the coast. There wasn’t much
colonial settling in the interior until after the slave trade was banned in
the British Empire. With the slave trade no longer an option, the British
turned to palm trees. Palm oil made for a great lubricant for industrial
machinery, and after colonization, more than 16 million pounds worth,
that’s currency not weight, by the way, were exported per year. The British
Empire laid claim to Igboland, which was rich in palm trees and also non-
Christians, a perfect opportunity to put the three C’s into practice. Thanks,
Thought Bubble. So, that helps us to understand the historical context for
the setting of the book. The OTHER historical context is the time in which it
was written. By 1958, Africa was beginning the process of decolonization, as
European powers gave up their colonies. And that meant that throughout
Africa, people were having conversations about what the future should look
like. Should we embrace European-style nation states? Should we have
some kind of pan-African cooperation? Marxism, capitalism - who would
make a better ally, the Soviet Union or the United States? And so in that
context, Achebe gives us a story about the pre-colonial Igbo world, which
has a stability, and a kind of strength to it, but is certainly not without its
problems, while also giving us a look at colonial Igboland. But it’s interesting
to note that because he is obsessed with strength and acts out of fear,
Okonkwo doesn’t fare particularly well under either structure. But anyway,
back to the text. So the British incursion into Igboland is the focus of the
final part of the book. Missionaries are the first to arrive in the interior
villages, and at first, there doesn’t seem to be much cause for alarm. The
first missionary Okonkwo encounters is a guy named Mr. Kiaga and he is
characterized as a man of great faith but is thought of as “harmless.” Then
there’s Mr. Brown, the missionary based in Umofia, who gained respect
through a “policy of compromise and accommodation.” Mr Brown is willing
to listen to the villagers talk about their beliefs, and tries to incorporate
some of their traditions into the practices of his Christianity. But then Mr.
Brown’s successor in Umofia, the Reverend James Smith, “saw things as
black and white. And black was evil. He saw the world as a battlefield in
which the children of light were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of
darkness.” And Smith’s uncompromising stance inevitably leads to conflict
with the people of Umofia, and ultimately to the destruction of the mission
church. We’re told “the red-earth church which Mr. Brown had built was a
pile of earth and ashes. And for the moment the spirit of the clan was
pacified.” So in three quick steps with three missionaries, we go from a
harmless one to one whose rigid belief system leads the community to
violence. The town then keeps itself armed and ready for a reprisal, and
“Okonkwo was almost happy again,” we’re told. But instead, Okonkwo and
several other village leaders are arrested, beaten by their jailers, and the
village is forced to pay a fine. Okonkwo calls a town meeting to organize a
forceful resistance and when the authorities arrive to break it up, he
beheads one of the messengers. And then the gathered villagers do not rally
to his side, and he knows that his cause is lost. “He knew that Umuofia
would not go to war. He knew because they had let the other messengers
escape.” And then when the British District Commissioner arrives to arrest
Okonkwo, he finds that Okonkwo has hanged himself. Achebe closes the
novel by revealing the District Commissioner’s thoughts about all he had
learned “in the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to
different parts of Africa.” The Commissioner wants to write a book about his
experiences, which he plans to call “The Pacification of the Primitives of the
Lower Niger.” And he decides that Okonkwo, the textured character we’ve
come to know through the course of this novel, would warrant, “Perhaps
not a chapter, but a reasonable paragraph.” In those final moments of the
novel, we see the loss of humanity that’s inherent to colonization, and
indeed that’s inherent to the privileged gazing upon the other. The
European system of colonization so profoundly failed to see human beings
as human beings that it wrought destruction in Africa and across the world.
But of course, Okonkwo and his village are not just a paragraph to us. They
are not a footnote. Things Fall Apart, and great books like it, help us to wipe
away some of the spots on the lenses of our perception. They let us see
more clearly, and ask us to imagine the world and the people in it with more
complexity and they ask us the big questions, the kinds that may not easy
answers, but are still worth pursuing. As Achebe said later in his life, “Igbo
people say, If you want to see it well, you must not stand in one place.”
Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next week.