“Things fall apart” only in the last third of the book by the same title. The first shows a simple yet rich life of a tribe in Niger. I was reminded that you do not have to have a lot of stuff to have similar social structures and conflicts as we have in modern societies and big cities. I can call the society of these tribes a lot of things, but primitives they are not. They have the same drives, aspirations, good and evil thoughts as members of any society. But having told them from an emic view makes all the difference. It is more than authentic; it not just captures the timelessness of the stories (they could have happened in any century), but also shows that the settings are often marginal in telling great tragedies.
The second third shows the protagonist’s life in the village of his mother’s, where he fled after accidentally killing a boy. He had to leave, but only for seven years. The system of justice practiced or more likely inherited in his tribe seems more just to me then the invader white men’s. At this point the things that fall apart seem to be only falling apart for him, who had the will and aptitude to become one of the leaders of his tribe. But large tragedy sets in when white men arrives.
In the second part of the book we just read about them in the news happening got other villages. But in the third part h returns to his home, where he has to deal with them personally. That’s when and where the decline of his personal life and his ancestral civilization really sets in. I cannot tell more without killing the story for you.
The beauty of this book is in its description of life before western civilization ruined it. The author, Chunua Achebe, combined the precision of anthropological observation with heartfelt feelings, but excluded the ethnocentricism we are accustomed to from western “participant observant”. The book showed to me the damage what colonialization, or more precisely proselytization can and did cause.
