Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe is one of the world’s best-known African authors. Born in Nigeria in 1930, he belonged to the Igbo people, the same community at the center of Things Fall Apart (note that the book styles the tribal name as “Ibo”). Though born roughly 40 years after the events in Things Fall Apart, Achebe experienced firsthand many of the same political, cultural, and religious divides found at the heart of the novel. For example, around 1900, Achebe’s father, Isaiah, became one of his community’s earliest converts to Christianity. A Protestant who raised his son in the Christian Church, Isaiah nevertheless continued to honor the traditions of Odinani, his ancestors’ traditional faith. This balance between Western and African traditions is reflected in Achebe’s full name, Albert Chinualumogu Achebe. While Albert is a European name, Chinualumogu is a traditional Odinani prayer that means “God is fighting on my behalf.”

The author himself embodies this uneasy balance between Igbo traditions and the West. Achebe refused to go by Albert, changing his name to an abbreviation of his middle name, Chinua. Achebe’s rebellion against his Christian given name is an inversion of the relationship between Okonkwo and Nwoye, who contradicts his father by embracing Christianity.