50 Fun Facts About Things Fall Apart

What does the District Commissioner decide Okonkwo's story deserves in his planned book?

A reasonable paragraph is all he allows Okonkwo in his planned 'The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger', the title that closes the novel. Achebe ends the book inside the coloniser's head, not the clan's.

What 'iron horse' do villagers in Things Fall Apart tie to a tree after killing its white rider?

A bicycle is what the Igbo evangelists later decide the 'iron horse' must have been, tied up in case it ran off to fetch the dead man's friends. Soldiers wiped out the whole village on a market day in reprisal.

Which wrestler, unbeaten for seven years, did Okonkwo throw at eighteen in Things Fall Apart?

Amalinze the Cat, unbeaten from Umuofia to Mbaino, is the man the young Okonkwo threw in a fight the old men still compared to a founding myth. That single bout made Okonkwo's name throughout the clan.

What accident at an elder's funeral gets Okonkwo banished from Umuofia for seven years?

His gun explodes during the funeral salute, and a piece of iron kills the dead man's son. Killing a clansman by accident was a 'female' crime against the earth goddess, so his compound was burned and he fled to his motherland.

In Things Fall Apart, which land do Mbanta's elders give the missionaries, expecting them dead in four days?

The Evil Forest, burial ground for evil diseases and dumping ground for dead medicine men's fetishes, was offered to the church as much as it cared to take. On the fourth day none of them had died, and a handful of converts followed.

Which nut do hosts in Things Fall Apart break for a guest, saying 'he who brings it brings life'?

Kola nut is the opening courtesy of almost every visit in Umuofia: host and guest argue over who should break it, then share it with alligator pepper and white chalk. Achebe mentions the ritual at least ten times.

Which phrase follows 'Things fall apart' in the Yeats line that gives Achebe's novel its title?

The centre cannot hold completes the third line of 'The Second Coming', which Yeats wrote in 1919 and Achebe printed as his epigraph. The poem's cyclical gyres suited a novel about one world giving way to another.

What kind of London business nearly lost the only handwritten manuscript of Things Fall Apart in 1957?

A typing agency Achebe found in a Spectator advertisement took his £22 fee and his sole copy, then went silent. His boss at the Nigerian Broadcasting Service, Angela Beattie, had to call in person to shake it loose.

Which hip-hop band's 1999 album borrowed its name from Achebe's Things Fall Apart and went platinum in 2013?

The Roots released their fourth album under the novel's name on 23 February 1999, and it took fourteen years to reach a million shipments. Yeats, Achebe and Philadelphia hip-hop share one three-word phrase.

What does Okonkwo's uncle say the common Igbo name Nneka means, in his lesson to the newly arrived exiles?

Mother is Supreme, the old man says, because a child runs to its mother when things are bad, just as a man in trouble returns to his motherland. He delivers the lesson to shame Okonkwo out of despair.

What baptismal name does Okonkwo's son Nwoye take after leaving home for the missionaries?

Isaac is the name Nwoye answers to by the time Umuofia's first missionary sends him to a training college for teachers at Umuru. Asked after his father by a family friend, he answers only 'He is not my father'.

Which daughter does Okonkwo keep thinking 'should have been a boy' in Things Fall Apart?

Ezinma, the only one of her mother's ten children to survive infancy, is the child Okonkwo understands best and the one who can make him eat. In exile she refuses every suitor so as to marry in Umuofia when the family returns.

Which missionary wins Umuofia's respect by treading softly on its faith and building a school and hospital?

Mr. Brown spends long hours debating theology with the elder Akunna through an interpreter and restrains his converts from provoking the clan. His health breaks, and his zealous successor undoes his patient work.

Why can Okonkwo's clansmen not cut down his body, leaving the task to the District Commissioner's men?

Suicide is an abomination against the earth, so a man who hangs himself will not be buried by his clansmen; his body is evil and only strangers may touch it. Umuofia's greatest warrior ends as a stranger's burden.

What does Okonkwo do to the head messenger who orders Umuofia's last great meeting to disperse?

Beheads him with two strokes of his machete, then sees the crowd let the other messengers escape and knows Umuofia will not fight. That knowledge, not the killing, is what sends him to the rope.

During which sacred observance does Okonkwo beat his youngest wife for going off to plait her hair?

The Week of Peace before planting is kept to honour the earth goddess, so beating Ojiugo in it is a crime against the land, not just a domestic one. The elders recall that in some clans a man who dies during that week is not even buried.

In the Igbo proverb Things Fall Apart quotes, what 'says yes also' when a man says yes?

His chi, a personal god that shares in every success and failure, is the clan's word for what Okonkwo thinks he has mastered by will alone. Achebe uses the same idea against him when a single accident undoes a lifetime.

In Things Fall Apart, proverbs are 'the palm-oil with which' what 'are eaten'?

Words need proverbs the way food needs palm oil, because the Igbo of the novel rate the art of conversation very highly. Unoka's own proverb-laden excuse to a creditor is the first example Achebe gives.

What descends on Umuofia 'once in a generation' and is roasted as a rare delicacy in Things Fall Apart?

Locusts are greeted with joyful chants and gathered by the bagful, and the elders say they return every year for seven years before vanishing for a lifetime. Okonkwo is crunching them when the elder brings the verdict on Ikemefuna.

Which masked figures, who judge disputes in Umuofia, does a convert unmask in Things Fall Apart?

The egwugwu are the clan's ancestral spirits made flesh, one for each village, and Okonkwo's wives might have noticed that one of them had Okonkwo's springy walk. Unmasking one in public is among the greatest crimes a man can commit.

What does Umuofia do with newborn twins, a custom that haunts Nwoye and draws him toward the church?

Leaves them out in the bush, in earthenware pots, because twins are an offence against the earth. The new hymn about brothers sitting in darkness seems to Nwoye to answer the question of the twins crying in the bush and of Ikemefuna.

Which creature, 'the emanation of the god of water', do Mbanta's converts kill, enraging the clan?

The royal python was the most revered animal in Mbanta and the clans around it, and no punishment existed for killing one on purpose because nobody thought it could happen. The rumoured killer falls ill and is dead within a day.

Okonkwo's closest friend says the white man 'has put a knife on' what, so that 'we have fallen apart'?

The things that held us together, he says, were cut when the clan's own sons joined the stranger's religion, so that Umuofia is unable to act as one. It is the novel's title restated from inside the clan.

Who tells the District Commissioner, beside Okonkwo's body, 'That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia'?

Obierika, the friend who sold Okonkwo's yams and 'thought about things', adds that the white man drove him to kill himself and will bury him like a dog. He had warned years earlier that killing Ikemefuna invites the goddess's wrath.

What has Eneke the bird learned, in a Things Fall Apart proverb, now that men shoot and never miss?

To fly without perching is the bird's answer, and the orator Okika turns it into a call to arms at the clan's final meeting. The same proverb appears early in the book as ordinary conversation, so its return lands as a threat.

How many villages make up the Umuofia clan that Okonkwo is famous throughout as Things Fall Apart opens?

Nine villages, each sending one masked spirit to the clan's court, make up Umuofia, the fictional Igbo clan at the centre of the novel. Its most potent war medicine, agadi-nwayi or 'old woman', was said to be as old as the clan itself.

Besides the boy Ikemefuna, what does Mbaino hand to Umuofia to atone for the murder of Udo's wife?

A young virgin and a lad of fifteen are the price of peace, and Okonkwo himself carries the ultimatum to Mbaino as 'the proud and imperious emissary of war'. The girl goes to the widower; the boy goes, fatefully, to Okonkwo.

Which elder warns Okonkwo, 'That boy calls you father. Do not bear a hand in his death'?

Ezeudu, the oldest man in the village and a holder of three titles, delivers the oracle's verdict on Ikemefuna and the warning in the same visit. Okonkwo ignores it out of fear of seeming weak, then cannot eat for two days.

Which uncle, the oldest of his mother's kinsmen, receives Okonkwo and his family in Mbanta?

Uchendu had buried Okonkwo's mother thirty years earlier and asks no questions when the exiles arrive; each of his five sons gives three hundred seed-yams so Okonkwo can farm. He is the novel's gentlest voice of authority.

Which missionary, who 'saw things as black and white', succeeds Umuofia's gentler first clergyman?

Reverend James Smith condemns his predecessor's policy of compromise, suspends a woman for letting her husband handle a dead child by the old ogbanje custom, and lets his zealots provoke the clan. The church burns soon after.

Which overzealous convert, a snake-priest's son, tears the mask off an ancestral spirit in Umuofia?

Enoch, already rumoured to have killed and eaten the sacred snake and been cursed by his own father, commits the outrage during the annual worship of the earth goddess. The masked spirits burn his compound, then the church.

Which priestess carries Okonkwo's daughter on her back through the night to the Oracle's cave?

Chielo, in ordinary life a widow with two children who sits beside the girl's mother in the market, becomes someone else when her god possesses her, and cries 'Beware, Okonkwo!' when he tries to intervene. The mother follows all night.

Which wife fell for Okonkwo at his famous wrestling match, then left her husband for him years later?

Ekwefi could not marry Okonkwo after the match because he was too poor to pay her bride-price, so she ran away from her first husband to him a few years on. She had married a man named Anene only because Okonkwo could not afford her.

What does a medicine man in Things Fall Apart call a child whose mother has buried every earlier baby?

An ogbanje is a wicked child who dies and re-enters its mother's womb to be born again, and a second expert is called in to break the cycle. A child who reaches six is usually thought to have stopped returning.

Which Things Fall Apart village is wiped out by soldiers at its market after its people kill a white man?

Abame had consulted its Oracle, which said the stranger would break the clan and spread destruction, so the villagers killed him; the reprisal killed everyone at the market but a few whose chi were 'wide awake'.

How many bags of cowries does the District Commissioner fine Umuofia's six jailed leaders for burning the church?

200 bags is the official fine, but the court messengers tell the village it is 250 and pocket the difference, after shaving the prisoners' heads and whipping them. The clan agrees to pay at once.

Which Joyce Cary novel's picture of Nigerians as 'savages or buffoons' made Achebe decide to become a writer?

Mister Johnson, the 1939 story of a young Nigerian who falls foul of the colonial authorities, was the book Achebe wanted to answer from the inside. Things Fall Apart is that answer, told by an Igbo narrator about Igbo lives.

Which Achebe novel follows Okonkwo's grandson Obi, a Lagos civil servant on trial for taking a bribe?

No Longer at Ease, published two years after Things Fall Apart, opens at Obi's trial and works backwards through his English education and his slide into the corruption of the new capital. Its title comes from T. S. Eliot.

Which actor rose to fame playing Okonkwo in the Nigerian Television Authority's 1987 miniseries of Things Fall Apart?

Pete Edochie rose to prominence as Okonkwo in David Orere's adaptation, with Justus Esiri as his friend and foil. The novel's first adaptation of all was a 1961 radio drama by the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, titled simply Okonkwo.

How many hardcover copies did Heinemann print when it first published Things Fall Apart in June 1958?

2,000 copies was the whole first printing of a novel since translated into more than fifty languages. Heinemann's executives had hesitated over whether to publish it at all.

By what nickname does Umuofia know the fierce Okonkwo, who fears his son is 'cold, impotent ash'?

Roaring Flame is the name Okonkwo recalls while staring into his log fire after Nwoye's conversion, before the thought arrives that living fire begets cold, impotent ash. He sighs heavily, and the smouldering log sighs with him.

Which outcasts, marked by long tangled hair they may never cut, are among the Mbanta church's first recruits?

The osu, a caste set apart for the gods and barred from assemblies, marriage and ordinary burial, reason that a faith which welcomes twins might welcome them too. They shave their heads and become its strongest adherents.

What is Umuofia's Oracle of the Hills and the Caves called, a word that also means 'woman' or an untitled man?

Agbala is the name worshippers crawl on their bellies to consult, and the word a playmate once flung at Okonkwo's father as an insult. A man with no title and the clan's Oracle share one name.

What insulting nickname does Umuofia give the District Commissioner's court messengers, because of their uniform shorts?

Ashy Buttocks is the name the messengers, officially called kotma, hate enough to beat the jailed leaders for using. Many of them came from Umuru on the Great River, where the white men had first arrived.

What does Umuofia call the 'worthless, empty men' who make up the church's first converts in Things Fall Apart?

Efulefu in the clan's imagery is a man who sold his machete and wore the empty sheath to battle, and the first converts are dismissed as exactly that. Within a few years titled men are cutting off their anklets to join them.

At what price did Heinemann sell the 1958 hardback of Things Fall Apart, which kept it obscure in Nigeria?

15 shillings for a hardback meant that Achebe remained largely unknown in his own country until the cheap paperback of 1962. The same publisher built a whole line of African writing on the lesson.

In a Things Fall Apart folk tale, what name does Tortoise adopt so the sky people's whole feast goes to him?

All of you is the new name Tortoise takes when the birds who lent him feathers each choose one for the journey, so that food prepared 'for all of you' becomes his alone. The birds take their feathers back and leave him stranded in the sky.

Which animal, with a hen, cloth and a hundred cowries, is Okonkwo fined for breaking the sacred week?

A she-goat heads the list the priest Ezeani dictates before dusk, after refusing to touch Okonkwo's kola. Elders note that the penalty has grown mild; once, a man who broke the peace was dragged through the village until he died.

What does the medicine man Okagbue dig out of Okonkwo's compound to break a child's bond with the spirit world?

A smooth pebble wrapped in a dirty rag is the iyi-uwa the girl says she hid, and once it is dug up and shown to the crowd everyone knows she will live. She chose the spot herself, leading the whole party on a wandering walk.

Which title, 'the third highest in the land', does Okonkwo plan to take on his return from exile?

Idemili is the title Okonkwo means to buy with his new wealth, along with initiating his sons into the ozo society, to announce his return. Umuofia, changed by the church and the court, barely notices him.