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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-AfrTeach@h-net.msu.edu (March, 1998)
Achebe, Chinua. _Things Fall Apart_. Expanded Edition with
notes. African Writers Series Classics in Context. Oxford and
Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1996. lviii
+ 148 Maps, glossary, bibliographical references, illustrations,
list of characters, introductory essays. $13.95 (paper) ISBN
0435 905 25
Reviewed for H-AfrTeach by Chris Conte, Utah State University.
<cconte@wpo.hass.usu.edu>
Teaching African History through the Novel:
A Classic Improved
Instructors presenting Africa's history to American high
school and university students face problems particular to
their endeavor. They must first convince students that
Africa is not one country and, that in terms of physical and
cultural geography, it is a very large and diverse place.
There are, consequently, a number of regional and local
histories of change and adaptation to internal and external
forces.
Students, on the other hand, are faced with history texts
not only filled with unfamiliar peoples and place names but
which also stress large diffuse processes -- the peopling of
the continent, precolonial agricultural and industrial
production and exchange, the slave trade, imperialism,
colonialism -- rather than discrete events in succession. In
short, they can become frustrated by the lack of a strong
central narrative often presented in their other history
courses.
The incorporation of literature into the African history
survey presents the instructor with a useful strategy to
bring some of the complexity into focus. For this reason,
Heinemann's African Writers' series, now in its 40th year of
publication, has been a blessing to both students and
teachers of African history. Of the 350 Heinemann titles,
the series' first publication, Chinua Achebe's _Things Fall
Apart_, remains the most widely read and discussed.
Most subscribers to H-AfrTeach will be familiar with the
story of Okonkwo, Achebe's tragic hero from southeastern
Nigeria's Igbo region who cannot cope with the
late-nineteenth century collapse of his community's cultural
institutions in the face of the British invasion of his
homeland. Nor will they likely need to be told that _Things
Fall Apart_ presents students with a compelling vision of an
African community in its cultural context. However,
instructors should know that Heinemann has re-released
Achebe's classic with 53 pages of introductory material,
particularly two valuable essays which make important
contributions to teaching the novel.
In the first of these essays, "Chinua Achebe and the
Invention of African Literature," Sam Gikandi explains the
novel's early appeal and the cultural politics surrounding
it. Gikandi suggests that Achebe's education in
colonialism's Western literary tradition during the 1940s
and 50s inspired him to represent the African experience
invariably missing in novels about Africa. Thus Achebe
sought to write in a way consciously different, both in form
and in content, from Europeans like Joyce Cary and Joseph
Conrad, who could write about Africans only as outsiders
looking in.
Gikani's essay further shows how Achebe forms the novel
around the storyteller, in other words, a sympathetic
insider who can nonetheless critique Okonkwo's blind
commitment to Igbo cultural doctrine. He also examines the
wide appeal of _Things Fall Apart_ to Nigerians, who, in
1958, were about to shun British authoritarianism and
undertake to rule themselves as a nation-state, a political
entity arguably unknown in precolonial African thought.
In the second introductory essay, "Igbo Culture and
History," Don C. Ohadike explains the diversity and
cultural complexity of pre-twentieth century southeastern
Nigeria. This section will be especially welcome to history
students because it argues for the antiquity of Igbo
settlement on the verdant landscape between the Niger and
Cross rivers without implying stasis. Ohadike highlights
Igbo society's close association of religion, iron working
and agricultural productivity.
Furthermore, Ohadike explains the historical centrality of
family, lineage and town rather than the ethnic group or
"tribe" so often invoked in journalistic descriptions of
Africa. With this knowledge, students can understand how,
over a relatively small region, subtle differences can exist
in language, social political organization, and religion.
Moreover, they will see that Igbo allegiances are not
primordial but shifting. In this vein, Ohadike elucidates
the cross cutting regional ties of marriage change and
culture.
Perhaps Heinemann's introduction of its Classics in Context
series with this new, expanded edition of _Things Fall
Apart_, and its continued publication of other classics,
will only enhance the English speaking students'
understanding of the contradictions, tragedies, triumphs,
ironies and paradoxes of Africa's history. It is a most
welcome addition both to the corpus of African literature
and the teacher's arsenal.
Copyright (c) 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This
work may be copied for non-profit educational use if
proper credit is given to the author and the list. For
other permission, please contact <H-Net@h-net.msu.edu>.
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