The Nigerian professor and author, Chinua Achebe has several collections in his bag cribbing the African society and is also regarded as “dominant figure in the modern African literature”. His novel “Things Fall Apart” has been recorded as the most-widely read novel across the world which portrays a gigantic and close look at the ancient African society. As per me, the novel is important for readers in a sense it does not decide or make the things look as per the writer’s view, but he transfers the authority to his readers to think and decide – after a careful and entire read of the novel – that what Okonkwo, the leading character in the novel, taking into consideration his ancestral customs and gods and goddesses, did was right or not; or in fact, what he had to do facing all the circumstances within a society as of him.
Coming to the novel, besides the story Chinua presents before his readers plenty of things we, even in the modern world, can learn from the book. Divided into three parts, the novel raises several points of which debates can continue for very long. One among those discussions can be on the concept of using “motherland” for one’s nation or state, not why not “fatherland”? It may sound differently by the ancient time, but the concepts of motherland and fatherland may hold significance in the present world. We all pronounce our land as motherland. According to the maternal uncle of Okonkwo in the novel, a mother is always passionate towards her children and can do anything to save them from any harm – the harm may be a punishment from father – whereas a father is disciplined and is less compassionate than a mother.
The writer goes on in the novel that whenever a person died in the primitive African society, he or she was to be sent back to their motherland and buried with their own kinship. So, we can derive from here that we call our land ‘motherland’ in a sense that a mother’s love towards her children is the purest of all and unmatchable; however, the land is so sacred, or to make the love for one’s land very pure, it is always resembled as motherland. In other simple words, the answer of using the word motherland for one’s land may differ from person to person, or perspective to perspective. In another point, he says that if fatherland is used for the residence of father, while motherland is sensed from the native of mother.
Another important thing in the novel was the ancient storytelling activity which was a way to transform from generation to generation the older stories, including the stories based on entertainment with fruitful results. I discuss it here because it linked with the ancient Baloch history, as I am myself a Baloch, where elders narrate stories of victories, wars, love and so forth which encourage the younger generation to learn from them – it ultimately results in their wise mentality.
“Fear a silenced man, and not a man who speaks or shouts.”
In the second part of the novel, the leading character had to face asylum for which he had turned to his motherland, the village of his mother’s kinship and where his mother was buried (burying his mother, or any other person, among their kinship was a custom in Africa). This part played the role of an interval, to me, in this book during which a foreign religion of the white men – the Christianity – begins to take roots in the nine adjourned villages, including Ononkwo’s motherland and fatherland. They were declared mad who had no sense of their wordings, to the villagers, and they paid no great heed to them in the thought they would fade away soon. But ignoring them was the biggest mistake the villagers had committed and allowing the strangers to make home for themselves and their “Home for Worship” of God, whom they called the father of Christ but with no wife.
When asked for a place for making their church, the villagers, with consensus, rendered them a land in “The Evil Forest” where they believed ghosts had homed in. They believed that they would soon be sent back by the ghosts and the gods of the village and then “they will know that they are untrue to their sole God with a child”.
Measuring such a thing deeply taking into account the present world, the ancient African society believed on polytheism – or nevertheless, most, or all, the societies across the globe believed so. However, the Africans are adherents of Christianity or Islam presently. Prof. Chinua tried to visualize in his novel how the African society was transformed to the present religion back in the past, which was the case with all the societies towards their transformation, if that had taken place.
Not only religion but the villagers, in the novel, felt that the “white men” had brought government with them as well along with their religion. Like the court system, the punishment and reward and all the other affairs of running a society once they were settled for religion preaching. To economically beat the villagers, they imported newly developed systems which hijacked the markets and it made the people believe, to a great extent, that the white men, or better we call them aliens from the novel’s perspective, were different, smarter and ‘real sons of God’, or even gods themselves. Although some, like Okonkwo himself, thought of fighting and resisting the foreigners, but they, besides Okonkwo, escaped it in the excuse that: “It is not our customs to fight for our gods.”
At the last part of the book, Okonkwo had reappeared in his own village with several thoughts in his mind owing to the cowardly attitude of the people of his motherland towards fighting a battle against the outsiders, hoping to get enough resistance in his fatherland. But he was left in great grief of knowing the fact that strangers had more spread in his fatherland than in his motherland. He spoke with several and stressed more on the need to begin resistance, but that did not work for him.
Another thing the foreigners had back then which was they took “religion and education hand in hand”. Wherever they built a church, they built a school too. When they found less interests of the people towards joining a school, they announced that if children were uneducated, they would bring people from outside and appoint them on the vacant posts. They succeeded. Similarly, they got more converts from the villagers and more power to rule them.
One thing was surprising for me while reading the novel was that despite knowing everything fairly well of what was going, how it was going and who was leading it, the villagers could barely gather courage to resist and fight against the ‘colonizers’. Their customs were told wrong and bad because they had belief on polytheism, their practices were termed evil and their lifestyle was termed wicked. How could they term them bad when they did not know anything about them except some practices and that too without the knowledge of its background? It had actually been a colonial tactic to undermine the customs and practices of the colony so that they are ruled easily: the white men had succeeded to a great deal. And then some of their own people called their customs malevolent. “How can they know about our customs and tell them wrong when they do not speak our tongue.”
The novel although poses a picture of the past, but has great impact in the present African society, or I may say the entire colonized nations. Professor Achebe has drawn well the effects of colonizers who come and term you inferior while declaring them superior. To understand what actually happened and how, I would ask my readers to study thoroughly the book “Things Fall Apart” and analyse how things actually fall apart in colonized societies.
