Things Fall Apart #1: Like a man

Footnotes & Tangents for chapters 1–5 of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Sep 29, 2025

‘When your neighbours go out with their axe to cut down virgin forests, you sow your yams on exhausted farms that take no labour to clear. They cross seven rivers to make their farms; you stay at home and offer sacrifices to a reluctant soil. Go home and work like a man.’

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Hello and welcome to another Footnotes & Tangents slow read. To get these posts in your inbox, turn on notifications for ‘2025 Things Fall Apart’ in your subscription settings.

Over the next five weeks, we will be reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. This is one of the most highly acclaimed novels of the twentieth century and a pivotal text in African Literature.

Things Fall Apart is on our radar this year because I have chosen three novelists admired by Hilary Mantel to accompany our five-month slow read of A Place of Greater Safety. We have already read JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, and in November we will read Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower.

The first week covers chapters 1-5, introducing us to Okonkwo and the Igbo community of Umuofia. I recommend reading this section of the book first, and then returning to this post to join in the discussion.

1. Chinua Achebe: The eagle on the Iroko tree

Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

Chinua Achebe was born in 1930 in Igboland in the eastern region of the British colony of Nigeria. His parents were early Igbo converts to Christianity within a society that predominantly adhered to the Odinani belief system practised by Igbo people across southern Nigeria. As such, Achebe grew up at the crossroads of cultures and their stories, from the Bible and Shakespeare to the oral traditions and ceremonies of Igboland.

In 1948, Achebe joined the first intake of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria’s first higher education institution. He switched from medicine to studying English, history, and theology in response to the negative portrayal of West African culture and people in Western literature.1 He had decided he would become a writer.

In 1954, he moved to Lagos and began working for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. His editorial work in the country’s capital immersed him in the literary and political life of a nation on the road to independence. Here, he began work on the novel that became Things Fall Apart.

Achebe’s first novel is the most translated, studied and read book in African literature. Its reputation and influence earned its author the appellation of the father of African literature, or “the eagle on the Iroko” – the king of birds upon the tallest tree of West Africa.

Chinua Achebe: A Life in Writing (The Guardian)

2. The centre cannot hold

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
   The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
   Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Asked about the book’s title, Achebe self-depricates: “I was showing off more than anything else.” Things Fall Apart alludes to the poem “The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats, and the first four lines of the poem appear as the book’s epigraph. “I took a general degree, with English as part of it, and you had to show some evidence of that.”

But it is a highly appropriate title for our story. It is a book about change and disintegration. W. B. Yeats conceived of history as a cycle of epochs, or gyres (a spiral or vortex), and he wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919 as one such epoch appeared to be ending in the bloodshed of the First World War, a global flu pandemic, and the anti-colonial struggle of his native Ireland.

Tangent: The apocalyptic appeal of WB Yeats’s The Second Coming (The Guardian)

Chinua Achebe, too, was writing at a turning point, as millions across Africa were winning independence from European colonisation. Things Fall Apart looks back to another moment of rupture in the 1890s, when the British arrived in Igboland. A social order is about to fall apart, spun into anarchy by forces within and without.

Footnote: Birth of the Nigerian Colony (Google Arts & Culture(

3. Looking for Igboland

Igboland is a cultural and linguistic region in southeastern Nigeria, located mostly in the Lowland forests east of the Niger River. Igbo culture has its roots in the tenth-century Kingdom of Nri. In this novel’s period, the dominant Igbo polity was the Aro Confederacy, which resisted British control until its defeat and collapse in 1902.

Footnote: Igboland and the Igbo people on Wikipedia

After Nigerian independence in 1960, Igbo nationalism culminated in the brief secession of the Republic of Biafra (1967–1970). Achebe served as a foreign ambassador to Biafra and wrote poetry about the struggle and conflict.2 He later wrote a memoir about the period, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, published in 2012, six months before his death.

Read an excerpt here

Igbo culture was and is diverse. Things Fall Apart introduces us to some aspects of Odinani, a polytheistic system of beliefs that incorporates nature and ancestor worship. A central idea in Odinani is the concept of chi. This personal deity is the personification of a believer’s fate – something akin to a Christian guardian angel or the ancient Roman idea of genius.

What is the role of chi in the story so far?

The Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says yes his chi says yes also. Okonkwo said yes very strongly; so his chi agreed.

Footnote: Chi in Igbo cosmology (Young African Pioneer)

4. Okonkwo: Igbo anti-hero?

His whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness.

So, first impressions: Okonkwo is a rather repellent figure. He beats his children. He beats his wives and almost shoots one of them. He believes displays of emotion are a sign of weakness, that to be weak is to be womanly, and that there is nothing worse than to be called a woman, agbala – the fate of his father, who was gentle and lazy.

Slow readers might be reminded of Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace, another character “clearly cut out for great things” who is nevertheless deeply flawed and unlikable when he appears first on the page.

What are your first impressions of Okonkwo? Why do you think Achebe has chosen this character as his main protagonist?

Achebe intends neither to idealise pre-colonial Igboland nor to romanticise his protagonist. The stage is set for tragedy and something altogether more interesting and complex than any simple narrative of a clash of cultures, the colonisers and the colonised.

“Reading it I recognized everybody... That man Okonkwo was my father.”
— James Baldwin on “Things Fall Apart”

Okonkwo embodies to excess his community’s patriarchal beliefs in male strength and honour. He beats his wife, Ojiugo, during the Week of Peace, and is censured by Ezeani, the priest of the earth goddess. When in a meeting, he calls another man a woman for having no title, the assembled men make him apologise.

Okonkwo’s hypermasculinity is a direct rejection of his father’s sensitivity3:

And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion – to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.

Unoka was a lazy farmer who hated war and was always in debt. But he loved music and nature, and Achebe gives Unoka a soul that soars with the birds:

Unoka loved the good fare and the good fellowship, and he loved this season of the year, when the rains had stopped and the sun rose every morning with dazzling beauty … Unoka loved it all, and he loved the first kites that returned with the dry season and the children who sang songs of welcome to them. He would remember his own childhood, how he had often wandered around looking for a kite sailing leisurely against the blue sky. As soon as he found one he would sing with his wole being, welcoming it back from its long, long journey, and asking it if it had brough home any lengths of cloth.

I really like Unoka, but his son calls him a weak and failed man; agbala, a woman. What an irony it is then to learn that Agbala is also the name of the powerful Oracle of the Hills and the Caves, a masculine deity with a priestess as interlocutor. This will all be significant when the Christian god turns up in our story, with his exclusively male priesthood.

More: A Retrieval of Women's Religious Experience in Things Fall Apart: Towards a Liberative Spirituality (Caroline Mbonu; contains spoilers)

‘Do not despair. I know you will not despair. You have a manly and a proud heart. A proud heart can survive a general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride. It is more difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone.’

Okonkwo disregards his father’s words. What do you think might be the significance of this exchange?

A pre-colonial Igbo compound. Photographed by Herbert Wimberley, c. 1903-18. Source.

5. Seven days and seven nights

It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.

I was curious to know what the significance of “seven days and seven nights” might be to the Umuofia origin story – since lucky number seven is deeply resonant within European and Judeo-Christian cultures as the seven days of creation.

Well, the Igbo week has four days: Eke, Orie, Afọ, and Nkwọ. Okonkwo is a common male name for a boy born on the day Nkwọ. Igbo cosmology divides the world into quarters corresponding to these four market days, and so the number four is considered sacred.

Footnote: More on Igbo cosmology

In contrast, seven corresponds to ideas of completion and fullness: a soul is reincarnated seven times before joining the ancestors. I wonder whether this was the rhetorical significance of the “seven rivers” that Unoka’s neighbours crossed to plant their yams.

What expectations do you have going into this story? Has anything surprised you so far?

Time unfolds in unfamiliar ways in Things Fall Apart. In Part One (Chapters 1–13), the narrative spirals, shifting back and forth to tell stories about the life of Okonkwo and his family. Achebe is reproducing Igbo forms of storytelling, cyclical and digressive. Notice how the story becomes more linear later with the arrival of the British.

6. Throw the cat

Amalinze was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten, from Umuofia to Mbaino.

Wrestling is at the heart of community life in Umuofia – and fundamental to Okonkwo’s identity. This week’s story begins and ends with wrestling matches, and we learn that Okonkwo won Ekwefi’s heart when he threw the Cat, “in the greatest contest within living memory.”

Footnote: Ritual contents and elements of drama in the Igbo
traditional wrestling festival

Chinua Achebe said writing is like wrestling:

It is like wrestling; you are wrestling with ideas and with the story. There is a lot of energy required. At the same time, it is exciting. So it is both difficult and easy. What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing. I have said in the kind of exaggerated manner of writers and prophets that writing, for me, is like receiving a term of imprisonment — you know that’s what you’re in for, for whatever time it takes. (source)

7. He who brings kola brings life

Unoka went into an inner room and soon returned with a small wooden disc containing a kola nut, some alligator pepper and a lump of white chalk.

The kola nut represents hospitality. It contains caffeine and its extract was originally an ingredient in Coca-Cola.

Tangent: The little-known nut that gave Coca-Cola its name (BBC)

Alligator pepper is a spice related to cardamom and is used in West African soups and stews. It is used with the kola nut in the rite, blessing or “breaking” described in Chapter One. The rite is conducted at the start of most ceremonies and events, as well as to welcome a visitor to your home.

Footnote: Igbo traditional kola nut as the ultimate symbol of hospitality and friendship (Journal of African Social Studies)

A traditional ókwá ọ́jị̀ or kolanut bowl for breaking the kola nut. Source.

8. The sound of sorrow and grief

… And so he changed the subject and talked about music, and his face beamed. He could hear in his mind’s ear the blood-stirring and intricate rhythms of the ekwe and the udu and the ogene, and he could hear his own flute weaving in and out of them, decorating them with a colourful and plaintive tune. The total effect was gay and brisk, but if one picked out the flute as it went up and down and then broke up into short snatches, one saw that there was sorrow and grief there.

An ogene is a type of bell that comes in various sizes and is central to Igbo traditional music. Ekwe and udu are percussive instruments. You can listen to musicians playing the ogene and udu here:

Watch: 18 Igbo Instruments That Can Turn Any Quiet Ceremony into a Massive Festival

You can hear the Ọjà played in the second video. Something is haunting about Unoka on his flute. His gentleness leaps out at me – I want to have had the pleasure of his company and listened to him play. But he was “an ill-fated man”, born into a world that valued male strength and bellicosity. The description of his death is nothing less than harrowing:

He died of the swelling which was an abomination to the earth goddess. When a man was afflicted with swelling in the stomach and the limbs he was not allowed to die in the house. He was carried to the Evil Forest and left there to die. There was a story of a very stubborn man who staggered back to his house and had to be carried again to the forest and tied to a tree. The sickness was an abomination to the earth, and so the victim could not be buried in her bowels. He died and rotted away above the earth, and was not given the first or the second burial. Such was Unoka’s fate. When they carried him away, he took with him his flute.

We learn so much about Unoka because he propels his son along a very different path, “possessed by the fear of his father’s contemptible life and shameful death.”

The Igbo New Yam Festival being celebrated in Dublin in 2008. Source.

9. Of gods, men and yams

I think I counted at least 24 named characters in the first five chapters of Things Fall Apart. Except for the “ill-fated lad” Ikemefuna, they are all members of Umuofia. So in only a few pages, we are introduced to a living community, full of life and death, labour and leisure, reputation and gossip.

Several of the men are given the title Ogbuefi, which signifies high status within the community. And we also quickly learn that they practice polygamy and that a man’s status can be gauged by the number of his wives:

There was a wealthy man in Okonkwo’s village who had three huge barns, nine wives and thirty children. His name was Nwakibie and he had taken the highest but one title which a man could take in the clan.

We are also introduced to several supernatural beings. There is the earth goddess Ani and the goddess of yams, Ifejioku. This week’s reading ends as the community gathers to celebrate the New Yam Festival, which falls in June at the start of the yam harvest.

Yams grow at the heart of Igbo culture and are central to Okonkwo’s story. They are “the king of crops” and “a man’s crop”, and Okonkwo measures his success by the growth of his crop.

Footnote: Why Yam is King: Inside Igbo Land’s Sacred New Yam Festival (NTA Network)
Footnote: The ancient lore of the humble Nigerian yam (BBC)

There is also Amadiora, god of thunder and lightning, and Agbala, the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves. Oracles played a crucial role in the lives of the community, resolving cases and family disputes.

One of the most famous Igbo oracles was the Ibini Ukpabi of the Aro Confederacy, where the condemned disappeared into dark tunnels to be sold into slavery. The oracle was destroyed during the Anglo-Aro War, and its site is a significant part of Nigeria's heritage.

Footnote: More on the “Long Juju Slave Route”

Entrance to the cave of the Ibini Ukpabi oracle at Arochukwu, known to the British as “Long Ju-ju”. Source.

The description of Agbala in Things Fall Apart powerfully evokes the claustrophobia and fear of the place:

The way into the shrine was a round hole at the side of a hill, just a little bigger than the round opening into a hen-house. Worshippers and those who came to seek knowledge from the god crawled on their belly through the hole and found themselves in a dark, endless space in the presence of Agbala […] Sometimes a man came to consult the spirit of his dead father or relative. It was said that when such a spirit appeared, the man saw it vaguely in the darkness, but never heard its voice. Some people even said that they heard the spirits flying and flapping their wings against the roof of the cave.

10. Glossary

Early editions of Things Fall Apart did not include a glossary. Chinua Achebe said, “I am not a fan of glossaries. Especially for fiction, I think a story should be able to do without this, because a text should explain its vocabulary as it goes. People must think that they will learn a lot from that glossary, but I’m sure that they don’t.”

With that in mind, here are some of the terms we encountered this week:

agbala: a woman. The word is used contemptuously to describe a man with no title, like Okonkwo’s father, Unoka. It is also the name of a male deity, the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves.

chi: personal god, spirit, or guardian angel.

ekwe: drums and gongs used in Igbo music/

egwugwa: a masked dancer who impersonates a spirit in Igbo rituals

eneke: “Eneke the bird says that since men have learnt to shoot without missing, he has learnt to fly without perching.” I think this is a species of swift, a bird that does not perch, stand or walk and spends the entire day on the wing.

eze-agadi-nwayi: the teeth of an old woman, the name Ikemefuna gives for a corn-cob with only a few scattered grains. In chapter four, we see how Ikemefuna is full of stories as he befriends Okonkwo’s son, Nwoye.

harmattan: the dry, dusty wind that blows south from the Sahara. More here.

idemili: a river god and a title of honour in Umuofia. The river god Idemili is associated with pythons. In the region of Igboland, also known as Idemili, pythons are invited into people’s homes and must not be harmed. More here and here. A sacred python will appear later in our story.

ilo: the village square. A useful resource: Igbo Village Square

inyanga: showing off or posturing impertinently. Tangent: Inyanga: a poem by Ugochukwu Damian Okpara

Iroko: a large West African tree. More here and here.

kwenu: hail! A greeting

ndichie: the village elders; the ancestors

nna ayi: our father, a respectful greeting

nso-ani: a religious offence, taboo or sin (nso) against the earth goddess (ani)

nza: a small, aggressive bird (the waxbill) who proverbially challenges his chi to a wrestling match. More here.

obi: the main hut in a compound used by the family head. More on Igbo architecture.

ogene: drums and gongs, used in Igbo music. Explore more here.

sisal: a long-bladed plant whose dried leaves are used to make ropes. Sisal-hemp is used to make handwoven Akwete cloth in Igboland. More here.

udala: a tree with edible fruit often found near the centre of the village. More here.

udu: drums and gongs, used in Igbo music. Watch women singing and playing the udu here.

Thank you

And thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

In the comments, let us know what caught your eye and ask the group any questions you may have. And if you’ve tumbled down a rabbit hole or taken your reading off on a tangent, please share where you have been and what you have found.

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