Things Fall Apart #4: Seven wasted years
Footnotes & Tangents for chapters 14–19 of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The seven wasted and weary years were at last dragging to a close. Although he had prospered in his motherland Okonkwo knew that he would have prospered even more in Umuofia, in the land of his fathers where men were bold and warlike.
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Hello and welcome to Week 4 of our slow read of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.
The fourth week covers chapters 14-19, Okonkwo’s seven-year exile and the arrival of the missionaries. I recommend reading this section of the book first, and then returning to this post to join in the discussion.
1. Plagues in the wilderness
When the rain finally came, it was in large, solid drops of frozen water which the people called ‘the nuts of the water of heaven’. They were hard and painful on the body as they fell, yet young people ran about happily picking up the cold nuts and throwing them into their mouths to melt.
How much biblical imagery have you noticed so far?
The hailstorm made me think of the plagues of Egypt, alongside the swarm of locusts. Perhaps we have also seen the plague of darkness on the moonless night when Chielo took Enzima into the forest? “Darkness held a vague terror for these people,” Achebe tells us, “even the bravest among them.”
Footnote: Darkness in Umuofia
Hardly an exceptional fear, but Achebe knew the weight of that word in the colonial imagination. Things Fall Apart responds to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where Africans are part of the unknowable, mysterious darkness that Europeans seek to control.
But if the Igbo people fear the darkness, they rejoice at hail1 and locusts – despite the damage both these “plagues” can do. The first British missionaries are welcomed by some and are a source of mirth for others. No one fears them. And the idea of locusts as an analogy for white colonialism is reiterated by the Oracle of Abame:
‘They were locusts, it said, and that first man was their harbinger sent to explore the terrain. And so they killed him.’
In the Book of Exodus, God inflicted the plagues on Egypt so that the Pharaoh would release the Israelites. The themes of divine retribution and justice run through the book: Okonkwo was warned about it, Obierika pondered it, and the Christians of Mbanta appear impervious to it.
After the Israelites left Egypt, God punished them with forty years in the wilderness for a lack of faith. Okonkwo names his son born in exile, Nwofia – “Begotten in the Wilderness.” Okonkwo doesn’t lack faith in the gods and the ancestors, but if you ask some in Mbanta and Umuofia, he does not see things as clearly as he might.
2. Mother is supreme
‘It’s true that a child belongs to its father. But when a father beats his child, it seeks sympathy in its mother’s hut. A man belongs to his fatherland when things are good and life is sweet. But when there is sorrow and bitterness he finds refuge in his motherland. Your mother is there to protect you. She is buried there. And that is why we say that mother is supreme.’
What do you make of Uchendu’s lesson for Okonkwo?
There appear to be at least two parts to this sermon.
First, Okonkwo’s eyes are closed to the importance of comfort and protection. He considers kindness and gentleness, dialogue and compromise to be all effeminate, unmanly attributes. So he considers Mbanta to be a “womanly clan” for refusing to fight the Christians, and the Christians themselves are “effeminate men clucking like old hens.”
It’s not that Uchendu denies the patriarchy. He forcefully upholds it. But he warns Okonkwo that disaster awaits him if he neglects the values that they regard as feminine. “Be careful,” he says, “or you may displease the dead.”
Secondly, he tells Okonkwo to get some perspective:
‘If you think you are the greatest sufferer in the world ask my daughter, Akeuni, how many twins she has borne and thrown away.’
“There is no one for whom it is well,” sing the grieving mothers. “Things fall apart” for everyone, everywhere, all the time.
How does Okonkwo respond to Uchendu’s advice?
Uchendu reads Okonkwo a lesson, and Okonkwo does not listen. If anything, after seven years, he is even more eaten up by “sorrow and bitterness.” His moment of revelation, staring into the log fire, is tragically shortsighted:
He sighed heavily, and as if in sympathy the smouldering log also sighed. And immediately Okonkwo’s eyes opened and he saw the whole matter clearly. Living fire begets cold, impotent ash. He sighed again, deeply.
The fire falls apart. Okonkwo falls apart. But his son Nwoye is not ash. Perhaps the real story is not that things fall apart, but that they change beyond our control, and we interpret that as “the prospect of annihilation.”
3. Abame is no more
‘Abame has been wiped out,’ said Obierika. ‘It is a strange and terrible story.’
The British arrive in an apocalyptic tale of miscommunication, murder and massacre. The tragedy of Abame is based on a real story. In 1905, the colonial physician Roger Stewart unintentionally rode his bicycle into Ahiara in the Mbaise region of Igboland. His body was never recovered, and his bicycle (his “iron horse”) was found tied to a tree. The British responded with a “punitive expedition” that massacred the inhabitants of Ahiara.
Little green men
The strange horror of white men on iron horses has something of an alien invasion about it. And indeed, Obierika remarks bitterly that, “Who knows what may happen tomorrow? Perhaps green men will come to our clan and shoot us.” That sense of the colonial encounter as alien invasion is something we will return to in our slow read of The Inheritors.
How do they respond to the story of Abame?
The people of Umuofia have discussed Abame in previous chapters. In Chapter Eight, they declared that “their customs are upside-down” because titled men tap trees, pound foo-foo, and haggle for the bride-price, “as if they were buying a goat or a cow in the market.”
So they greeted news of Abame’s destruction with schadenfreude: “They were fools,” said Okonkwo, and “They have paid for their foolishness,” adds Obierika. Uchendu believes it was stupid to “kill a man who says nothing”, while Okonkwo thinks they should have better defended themselves.
I discovered a vociferous critique of Achebe’s description of Abame in which the writer accuses Achebe of misrepresenting the customs of the real Igbo community of Abam.
Read here: Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Separating facts from fictions (contains spoilers)
Abali O. Abali argues that Achebe contrasts an ideal Umuofia with a degenerate Abame. But I don’t think Umuofia is idealised – it is riddled with contradictions. The point is not that Abame is “upside-down” but that the people of Umuofia think so. Uchenda has the wisest words here:
‘There is no story that is not true,’ said Uchendu. ‘The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.’
4. Missionaries and worthless men
In 1821, a 10-year-old boy called Ajayi was abducted from his Yoruba village and sold to Portuguese slave traders. The ship that was to take him to the Americas was boarded by the British Royal Navy, enforcing the abolition of slavery along the West African coast. Ajayi was resettled in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where he converted to Christianity and was baptised as Samuel Ajayi Crowther after one of the pioneers of the Anglican Church Missionary Society.
Crowther later travelled to England, studied Latin and Greek, and began missionary work in his native Yoruba country. He joined the first expeditions up the Niger River into Igboland, published the first Igbo primer and was ordained as the first African Anglican bishop in West Africa in 1864.
More: Anglicanism In Igboland
Worthless men
They were mostly the kind of people that were called efulefu, worthless, empty men. The imagery of an efulefu in the language of the clan was a man who sold his matchet and wore the sheath to battle. Chielo, the priestess of Agbala, called the converts the excrement of the clan, and the new faith was a mad dog that had come to eat it up.
Efulefu means “the one who is lost”, and of course, proselytising religions frequently find ready converts among those who feel disconnected or disenchanted with life and their society. The acceptance of osu outcasts also reflects Christianity’s popularity among “untouchable” castes.
Osu were regarded as “living sacrifices” belonging to the gods and ostracised from human society. The Osu caste system was officially abolished in Nigeria in 2018. In No Longer At Ease, the sequel to Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo’s grandson falls in love with an osu woman.
Footnote: The story of Nigeria’s ‘untouchables’ (BBC)
5. Nwoye’s conversion
But there was a young lad who had beeen captivated. His name was Nwoye. Okonkwo’s first son. It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul – the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry place of the panting earth. Nwoye’s callow mind was greatly puzzled.
This may be my favourite passage in Things Fall Apart. It reminds me of various passages in War and Peace where Andrei and Pierre are moved by music or the heavens. The hymn Nwoye has heard is probably “The People That in Darkness Sat” by the Scottish pastor and abolitionist John Morison. The hymn adapts lines from Isaiah 9: 2-7. Note the recurring theme of “darkness” and the power of music that links Nwoye back to his grandfather.
Why has Nwoye converted to Christianity? And how has Achebe handled this part of the story?
6. The new dispensation
Suppose when he died all his male children decided to follow Nwoye’s steps and abandon their ancestors? Okonkwo felt a cold shudder run through him at the terrible prospect, like the prospect of annihilation. He saw himself and his fatehr crowding round their ancestral shrine waiting in vain for worship and sacrifice and finding nothing but ashes of bygone days, and his children the while praying to the white man’s god.
This powerful image immediately conjured up the fears that run through Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy. In pre-Reformation England, the living made prayers to quicken the passage of their ancestors through purgatory. In the 1530s, the institution was in doubt but not officially refuted. This is a key idea in Mantel’s books: no one is certain where the dead have gone or whether prayer works anymore.
If you believe the old religion, as Okonkwo does, or as Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, does, then this religion is nothing less than “annihilation”.
7. The sacred python
The royal python was the most revered animal in Mbanta and all the surrounding clans. It was addressed as ‘Our Father’, and was allowed to go wherever it chose, even into people’s beds.
There are two incidents of zealous converts killing éké, the sacred royal python – here in Mbanta and next week in Umuofia. The snake is revered as an agent of Ala, the Earth divinity, or of the goddess of water, Idemmili.
Later, Achebe tells us that “the rainbow was called the python on the sky.” Okonkwo sees these rainbows at the end of the rainy season and calls on his wives to prepare a farewell feast. This has echoes of Noah’s sacrifice of gratitude after the Great Flood in the Book of Genesis.
8. A feast of gratitude / the last supper
What changes have the elders seen, and why are they afraid?
‘An abominable religion has settled among you. A man can now leave his father and his brothers. He can curse the gods of his fathers and his ancestors, like a hunter’s dog that suddenly goes mad and turns on his master. I fear for you; I fear for the clan.’
Part Two ends with perhaps the largest feast in the entire book. Food has played a deeply symbolic role in the story, a means of preserving cultural unity and social bonds: “We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.” As the threat of disunity grows, so do the spectacles of strength and unity.
Footnote: A recipe for egusi soup
Footnote: A recipe for bitterleaf soup
Perhaps we hoped Okonkwo would learn something in exile. I think we, the readers, have learned much and seen much, but our protagonist feels his time has been wasted and is impatient to return home.
What have we learned? And how has Okonkwo changed?
9. Glossary
chi personal god.
efulefu people regardless as worthless or useless by the community.
isa-ifa the ceremony in which the bride is judged to have been faithful to her groom.
obi the principal hut within a compound.
osu outcasts, living sacrifices to the gods, ostracised by the community.
umuada daughters who have married outside the clan.
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.
Next week, we will read chapters 20–25. The reading schedule, weekly posts and further resources can all be found on the main Things Fall Apart page of my website, Footnotes & Tangents.
This slow read and book guide is free. If you have enjoyed it and found it helpful, please consider a paid subscription or a one-off donation to support Footnotes & Tangents. Thank you!
Until next time, I wish everyone happy and adventurous reading.
Simon
“Perhaps the real story is not that things fall apart, but that they change beyond our control, and we interpret that as “the prospect of annihilation.” This is a profound statement, Simon. Thank you.
I must admit that the Biblical allusions went right over my head, so thank you for that, Simon!
I was mystified by the first reference to the "iron horse," although an explanation did show up further in the reading. :)