Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe 1958

Devastation Rating

Existential Dread
Nigeria colonialism identity tradition

Our Take

Okonkwo's story is the story of Igbo civilization's last generation of self-determination. Achebe does not make it simple — Okonkwo is a man worth knowing and a man capable of violence — and the British arrival is rendered as exactly what it was: the end of a world. The District Commissioner's proposed book title, in the final paragraph, is the sharpest sentence in African literature.

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