If One Finger Brought Oil - Things Fall Apart Part 1: Crash Course Literature 208

(Episode 8)

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is set in what is now Nigeria during the late
19th century, but it was written in 1958 as the colonial system was falling apart in Africa.
One of the reasons Things Fall Apart is so important is that prior to it, most novels about
Africa and Africans in English had been written by Europeans. Achebe turned the
traditional European notion of Africans as savages on its head and confronted the great
failure of people to quote “See other human beings as human beings” With characters
that you can feel with and think with and breathe with, layer after layer of the reality of
the colonial situation in Igboland is exposed, and we see the vicious cyclical realities
that are produced by both individual and institutional power when it’s based in fear and
hatred and ignorance.

Things fall apart in Things Fall Apart not only because of the outside pressures of
colonialism but also because of the interior pressures of the main character, Okonkwo.
Okonkwo is a man known “throughout the nine villages and even beyond” whose “fame
rested on solid personal achievements.” He is known for his strength and his wrestling
ability. Like during his prime, in one of the community festivals, before a crowd of
10,000 or more people, Okonkwo out-wrestled a man known as the Cat in a match. The
Cat! And we’re told of this match, “The old men agreed it was one of the fiercest since
the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.”
We learn all of this, by the way, in the opening paragraph of the novel, so we’re
immediately drawn into this world of order and belief, of competition and struggle, and of
stories that are kept and passed won by elders. And we know from the beginning that
Okonkwo is a man held in high esteem not only for his wrestling ability, but also
because he had, quote “Risen so suddenly from great poverty and misfortune to be one
of the lords of his clan.” But despite his status and his achievements, Okonkwo is
haunted. Now it’s not quite the ghost of the Hamlet’s father walking around at midnight
brooding about vengeance, but Okonkwo sees his father everywhere he goes. His
father, Unoka, owed debts all over town and spent like all of his time playing the flute
and drinking palm wine. The important thing here is that in 19 th century Igboland, you
couldn’t get ahead in life if you weren’t willing to work which come to think of it, is also
true today, Me From the Past. Okonkwo grew up knowing that the whole village taught
his father was a loser, and the pain of it stuck with him. Like, Achebe writes, “His whole
life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure, and of weakness.” This isn’t like my fear
of spiders or my fear of heights or my fear of air travel or my fear of peanut butter
sticking to the roof of my mouth. This is serious fear. For Okonkwo, “It was deeper and
more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious Gods and of magic, the fear of the
forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw.” Which quote
allows me to mention something really important about Things Fall Apart that “Red in
tooth and claw” line is borrowed from Tennyson poem. And throughout the novel,
Things Fall Apart is conscious both of African storytelling forms and European ones.
This exploration of connections and differences between two narrative traditions is really
interesting and it’s not something you find as much in like you know, Jane Eyre or
Hamlet. Anyway, Okonwo is always running from this deep down fear of weakness and
failure, and it gives him the drive to go from being a sharecropper to power and status
and wealth. It also makes him into kind of a jerk. Okonkwo develops “one passion- to
hate everything that Unoka had loved. One of these things was gentleness and another
was idleness.” There’s a great moment in the novel where Achebe says Okonwo,
“seemed to walk on springs, as if he was going to pounce (jump or move quickly) on
somebody.” And then notes, “And he did pounce on people quite often.” This pouncing,
and more generally just his rage, eventually drives him to three transgressions (offense
or crime) that he can’t undo and his punishment is seven years of exile. Then, of
course, his dreams of greater power within his clan dissolve. So let’s look at Okonkwo’s
first two big mistakes in the Thought Bubble. Okonkwo’s world, much like the ancient
Greek world in Oedipus, is one where mistakes are always punished and he does get
punished for his three mistakes. The first is his ferocious beating of one of his wives
during the Week of Peace, a week when all violence is forbidden (prohibited), to honor
the Earth goddess and makes sure that this year’s harvest will be bountiful. Okonkwo
doesn’t just break the Week of Peace, he shatters (break or smash) it. Not only does he
beat his wife for going to get her hair plaited rather than cooking, he tries to shoot her.
Luckily for all involved, he is terrible shot, and he misses. Side note, Okonkwo has a
real problem with women throughout the book. He’s consistently brutal and violent, and
the description that he quoted “Rules his household with a heavy hand” is an
understatement. His brutality is closely connected to his fear of anything that he
perceives as gentle or weak and his ignorant belief that those traits should be
associated with the feminine, which the book itself later dispels by showing one of his
other wives and her courage and strength when it comes to protecting her daughter.
Okonkwo’s second transgression is the killing of a boy with his machete, and it’s not just
any young man. It’s Ikemefuna, who Okonkwo raised in his house for three years, a
young man who called him Father. Ikemefuna had been turned over to the clan as a
sacrifice by another village in order to avoid war and he’d been sent to live in
Okonkwo’s compound, where he became a member of the family, and a great friend to
Okonkwo’s son. And we’re told, “Okonkwo was inwardly pleased at his son’s
development, and he knew it was due to Ikemefuna. “Of course he never shows it, for
“Okonkwo never showed any emotion openly, unless it was the emotion of anger.”
Eventually, the clan decided that Ikemefuna should be killed to satisfy the Earth
Goddess. Okonkwo is advised not to participate due to his close relationship with the
boy, but he ultimately does the killing himself because “He was afraid of being thought
weak.”

Okonkwo is finally exiled, not for beating his wife, not for killing Ikemefuna, but for
an accident. His gun explodes during a funeral, and a man is killed. This is called a
“female ocho,” or female murder, because it was not on purpose. I’ll just briefly point to
the irony of his avoidance of all things feminine and also the association of a gun
exploding with femininity. Although it was an accident, Okonkwo had killed a clan
member and had offended the earth goddess, and so he goes into exile. He and his
family flee (run away) the village and their home compound is burned to the ground.
Now, Okonkwo’s best friend, Obierka, who helps Okonkwo during his exile, wonders,
“Why should a man suffer so grievously (very severe) for an offense he had committed
inadvertently? (accidentally) ” As is often the case in the village, the answer comes in
the form of a proverb. “As the elder said, if one finger brought oil it soiled the others.”
Okonkwo had done wrong and he must be exiled, or else the whole community might
be punished for what just he had done. This attitude preys on the community’s fear of
being entirely destroyed along with their communal memory of elders and ancestors.
And that desire to keep the community intact (whole or complete) at all costs is why the
community ultimately doesn’t follow Okonkwo at the end of the novel. Then of course
even though they don’t follow him, the community can’t stay intact. Why? Well, because
missionaries and the British Empire which are really branches of the same tree. When
the first missionaries appear before Okonkwo and his family, during their exile, only one
young person was truly captivated (interested), Okonkwo’s first son, Nwoye and
Okonkwo can sense his son slipping away, and filled with his tragic rage (violent or
uncontrollable anger), he tries to control him by pinning (attaching or holding) him down
at the throat and threatening him. And as you may know if you’ve ever tried threatening
a teenager, threats only drive them further away, and after this incident, Nwoye joins the
missionaries for good. What I can say, Okonkwo, you should have read more young
adult novels. And Okonkwo’s takeaway from this experience is not that he’s a jerk but
instead that his son is weak. He sits, staring into a fire, and reflects upon his son’s
departure and remembers that people called him “the Roaring Flame.” And as he
considers this, “Okonkwo’s eyes were opened and he saw the whole matter clearly.
Leaving fire begets cold, impotent (weak or ineffective) ash.” Okonkwo decides that he
was the roaring flame and that his son is the cold, impotent ash. By the time Okonkwo
returns from exile, a Christian missionary church has arrived in his own village, and
many people have converted to Christianity. The first converts are those outcasts from
society, they’re not even allowed to cut their hair. And that reminds us that it’s not only
the Europeans who at times have failed to see human beings as human beings. So
those outcasts are the initial convers and it eventually leads to the arrival of the British
Empire and radical change in Igbo society. In that, we see how the community’s
obsession with strength and stability ultimately leads to weakness and instability just as
it does in Okonkwo’s life. So, the British Empire follows on the heels of the church and
sets up courts and police and prisons and trading posts. And then finally, Okonkwo’s
world completely crumbles (fall down).

For today, I want to end with another author who wrote about power in colonial
Africa, Frantz Fanon, who talked about means of resistance. In one of his most famous
works about how power operates, his final invocation, his gesture of resistance is, “O
my body, make of me always a man who questions!” And maybe that’s where Okonkwo
fell down. He isn’t able to question a system that discards individuals for the perceived
greater good and he isn’t able to question his own narrow definition of strength. But let
me submit to you that these problems are not exclusive to 19 th century Igboland. Like
Okonkwo and his community, we both as individuals and as communities also struggle
to see other human beings as human beings and just as in Things Fall Apart, the
consequences are often disastrous.
 Things Fall Apart, Part 2: Crash Course Literature 209

(Episode 9)

The length of the 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. 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 19 th 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.

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. 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. 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 (religious or other serious ceremony) 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 UItopia. 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?

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 so-called Three C’s: commerce, Christianity
and civilization. So, at the Berlin conference of 1885, Africa’ 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 setting 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 (oil) 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.

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 Europeans-style nation
states? Should we have some kind of pan-Africa 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 t oincorporate some of their traditions into the practices of his Christianity. But then,
Mr. Brown’s successor in Umofia, the Reverend James Sith, “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
builty 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 d 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 the 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 (existing in
something as a permanent attribute) 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 te 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.”