Portrait of Chinua Achebe
Meet the Author

Chinua Achebe

Nigerian · 1930–2013 · Novelist and essayist

Portrait: Carlo Bavagnoli, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A Nigerian novelist who wrote Things Fall Apart to show Igbo life on its own terms, before and during the arrival of British rule.

1 StoryBites Edition1 Big Book
Start with Things Fall Apart → Browse the editions

Why read Chinua Achebe?

Things Fall Apart follows Okonkwo, a proud and driven man in the Igbo village of Umuofia in the late nineteenth century, as his own fears and the arrival of missionaries and colonial officers break his world apart. Achebe spends most of the book on ordinary village life, its farming, courts, marriages, and festivals, so that you know what is being lost before it goes. His English is plain and full of Igbo proverbs, which carry much of the characters’ reasoning. On the last page the point of view shifts to a British officer, and the gap between the story you have just read and the one he plans to write is the book’s argument.

A life in six dates

  1. 1930Born in Ogidi, in southeastern Nigeria
  2. 1953Graduates from University College, Ibadan
  3. 1958Publishes Things Fall Apart
  4. 1960Nigeria becomes independent, and Achebe publishes No Longer at Ease
  5. 1967Supports the breakaway state of Biafra through the Nigerian Civil War, which lasts until 1970
  6. 1975Criticizes the racism of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in a lecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
  7. 2013Dies in Boston

Themes across the work

NovelsWorld literatureAfrican literatureColonialismTragedy

The StoryBites Editions

Context that actually matters

Igbo societyMost Igbo villages were governed by councils of elders and by titles a man could earn, not by kings, which is why Okonkwo’s hunger for rank and his fear of weakness matter so much. Umuofia is invented, but its customs draw on that world.
Missionaries and British ruleChristian missions and colonial government moved inland in southeastern Nigeria from the late nineteenth century. Achebe’s own father was an early convert who worked for the Church Missionary Society as a teacher and evangelist.
Writing backAchebe wrote partly in answer to European novels that showed Africans as people without history. He took his title from W. B. Yeats’s poem The Second Coming.