Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Society can be as dangerous to an individual, as an individual can be to society.

This is the first book in a three-part series by Chinua Achebe. A one of its kind story, a tale that leaves you marveling, bewildered and heart broken, simultaneously and one-after-the-other. It brings to you, in a well cooked and well narrated tale, the wonder, the flaw, the irony of being human – a dedicated yet helpless being. It introduces you to the simplicity and the naivety of the natives of an Igbo village in Africa, and the introduction of the complexity of the English to that simple society.

It is the story of Okonkwo, a renowned and acknowledged wrestler, the best in nine villages around Umuofia and beyond. With sheer handwork he has managed to establish himself in his people, separating himself from the shadow of his father, that he has grown up to hate. An unfortunate event results in his exile and things start to fall apart. A slow incursion of the English missionaries further deteriorate the circumstances. This is a story of how a devoted Okonkwo faces this much greater power, well beyond his or his people’s control.

It introduces you to the intricacies of the belief system of a society, to the veil of masculine pretense shrouded over hearts and reared in to believing the synonymy of  emotions and gentleness with weakness and femininity. It introduces you to how a rural society easily divides everything, all occurrences beyond its comprehension – due to lack of understanding and scientific knowledge,  in to black and white, into good and evil. How even the faintest of hearts stick and abide by these rules of their closely knit world goes on to highlight that man has always been a social animal.

It confronts you to how one is fooled to equate education and modernization with supremacy over the archaic and native cultures. It confronts you to the helplessness of these cultures that have been wiped out because the white man thought himself and his policies and his religion to be superior to those he found on the land he had landed on by mistake; the lands that he thought now belonged to him and took it on himself to teach, by hook or crook, the modern and civilized way of being to the ‘uncultured’. This is a story which shares the glimpse of ‘how the white man came quietly and peaceably’ to this new world, with his religion and mannerism, codified the color of skin as good and bad, and robbed native cultures.