Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart

           Conventional wisdom among Christians today is that international evangelism need not necessarily bring about cultural conflict, so long as missionaries arrive abroad with spiritual, not political, objectives. However, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart intends to remind us that the two motives—conquering and converting—were originally mixed. The missionaries here don’t arrive in Africa meaning to imprison and kill, but the tension they bring about makes instability seem inevitable.

            What I like best about the novel is how so much time is given to the world of the Ibo village in the first three quarters of the book. If, say, the novel had begun with the arrival of the missionaries, or if they became just gradually more present, the reader wouldn’t be able to recognize the greatly disruptive quality of the white intruders in quite the same way.

             Developing the setting so thoroughly was a smart move on Achebe’s behalf for a few other reasons: spending so much time in a world so foreign to me is enjoyable in that I am able to learn so much, but it also makes the moments where I identify with the characters seem that much more vivid. I’m thinking specifically of the way a son wishes to be the opposite of his father, so much so that grandfather and grandson seem sometimes like the closer match. Okonkwo and Nwoye each mean to live a life that cancels the wrongdoings of their fathers, and in trying to erase the shame, each creates mistakes of his own. This is a universal experience.

            My family’s background being what it is (my grandparents were missionaries—all of them), I am naturally fascinated with moments when Achebe is “gentle” in his depictions of the intruders. Nwoye’s conversion is an especially interesting moment in that Achebe makes it seem like a natural move. For a moment we are in Nwoye’s mind as, “The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul—the questions of the twins crying in the bush and of Ikemefuna who was killed” (147). And, indeed, the practices of the tribe may seem troubling for the readers also. But then the missionaries are no less cruel. By the end of the novel, their court-ordered executions and imprisonments appear to the reader as merely another type of needless brutality. There is nothing so cruel in the Ibo culture that it isn’t matched in some way by the practices of the missionaries.

            Still, it is interesting how Mr. Brown is offered up as a sort of peaceful alternative to the much more aggressive Mr. Smith. Brown preaches against “an excess of zeal” (178) and has thoughtful conversations with the tribesman in which he appeals to their existing religious structures, (“‘In my religion, Chukwo is a loving Father, and need not be feared by those who do His will’” [181].). I don’t doubt whose side Achebe is on, but I feel there is a model in this peaceful dialogue that he might embrace as an alternative to the brutality that has come to characterize interactions between the two cultures.