Where to Start with Chinua Achebe: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Chinua Achebe — whether to begin with Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, or No Longer at Ease. A complete reading guide to Achebe's novels.
Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) is the most important African novelist of the twentieth century — the writer who, with Things Fall Apart (1958), created the template for the African novel in English and demonstrated that the literature of postcolonial Africa could render its subjects with the same authority, complexity, and humanity as any European tradition. His major novels — Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People — constitute the most complete fictional account of Nigeria’s passage from colonial to postcolonial status in any literature.
Where to Start
The Essential Novel: Things Fall Apart (1958)
The essential first Achebe — and one of the most important novels in world literature. Okonkwo’s story — his rise to prominence in Umuofia, his exile, his return, and his destruction by the forces of colonialism — is simultaneously a character study, a tragedy, and an account of what it means for a civilisation to be disrupted by a power that understands nothing about it. The novel is short (under 200 pages) and immediately compelling; its English prose is inflected with Igbo proverbs and oral storytelling rhythms that give the language a distinctive music. The opening (‘Okonkwo was well-known throughout the nine villages and even beyond’) establishes the tone of a griot’s tale, epic and intimate simultaneously.
The Second in Sequence: No Longer at Ease (1960)
The direct sequel to Things Fall Apart — following Okonkwo’s grandson Obi Okonkwo, who has studied in England and returned to Lagos as a colonial civil servant, and whose attempt to maintain his integrity in a system built on bribery ends in corruption and failure. The novel is the bridge between the pre-colonial world of the first novel and the post-independence world of the later ones; its tragedy is the tragedy of the educated African whose formation has been simultaneously English and Igbo, and who belongs fully to neither world.
The Masterpiece: Arrow of God (1964)
Achebe’s most formally accomplished novel — and his most sympathetically complex. Ezeulu’s position as chief priest of Ulu gives him a power that is simultaneously political and spiritual; his conflict with the British district officer G.K. Winterbottom, and with Nwaka and the faction within his own community who oppose him, places him in an impossible position. The novel’s account of how colonial power operates through indigenous social divisions — and how traditional authority can be turned against itself — is Achebe’s most politically sophisticated. The ending is one of the most devastating in African fiction.
The Political Novel: A Man of the People (1966)
Achebe’s most satirical novel — published the year of the first Nigerian military coup and widely read as a prediction of it. The narrator Odili is a young schoolteacher who becomes involved in opposition politics against Chief Nanga, the corrupt but enormously popular Minister of Culture, and whose political idealism is tested by the realities of Nigerian electoral politics. The novel is very funny and very dark; its account of post-independence political corruption — the way democratic forms are hollowed out by patronage and ethnic loyalty — remains one of the most accurate in African literature.
Anthills of the Savannah (1987)
Achebe’s final novel — the most formally complex and the most directly contemporary. Three friends from childhood occupy positions of power in a fictional West African military government: Sam is Head of State; Chris is the Minister of Information; Ikem is a newspaper editor. Their diverging responses to state power — accommodation, complicity, resistance — constitute Achebe’s most sustained meditation on what intellectual responsibility means in a military dictatorship. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize; his most ambitious late work.
Reading Chinua Achebe
Achebe’s prose is built on the proverbs and oral traditions of Igbo storytelling — phrases like ‘When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk’ appear throughout his novels as the natural language of the characters’ thought. This oral quality, which can initially seem stylised, quickly becomes the most distinctive and most pleasurable element of his prose: a language that is English but inflected throughout by a different way of thinking and speaking. Reading him requires the same courtesy that all serious fiction requires: the willingness to inhabit a world that is not one’s own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Chinua Achebe?
Things Fall Apart (1958) is the essential starting point — the most widely read African novel in any language and one of the most important works of postcolonial literature. It follows Okonkwo, a warrior in the Igbo village of Umuofia in the late nineteenth century, through the disruption of his society by Christian missionaries and British colonial administration. The novel is short (under 200 pages), immediately compelling, and the best single account of what colonialism meant from the inside — for the people whose world it transformed. Arrow of God is the best second Achebe; No Longer at Ease for readers who want to continue directly into the colonial and post-colonial Nigeria sequence.
What is Things Fall Apart about?
Things Fall Apart (1958) follows Okonkwo, a man of great physical strength and determination in the Igbo community of Umuofia in what is now southeastern Nigeria, in the 1890s. Okonkwo's tragedy is both personal (his fear of appearing weak like his father drives him to excessive harshness) and historical (the arrival of Christian missionaries and British administrators destroys the social order in which his values have meaning). The novel is Achebe's response to the representation of Africa in European fiction — particularly Conrad's Heart of Darkness — and his demonstration that the people whom European colonialism dismissed as primitive had a complex, functioning civilization whose disruption was catastrophic. The title comes from W.B. Yeats.
What is Arrow of God about?
Arrow of God (1964) is Achebe's most complex novel — a story of Ezeulu, the chief priest of Ulu (the god of the six villages of Umuaro) in colonial Nigeria in the 1920s, who comes into conflict with both a British district officer and rival factions within his own community. The novel is Achebe's most fully realised account of traditional Igbo society and its internal contradictions, and of the way that colonial power operates through and within existing social tensions rather than simply against them. Many critics consider it Achebe's greatest achievement.
How important is Chinua Achebe?
Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) is the founding figure of modern African literature in English — the novelist who demonstrated that the African novel in English could render African experience from the inside rather than through the colonial gaze of European fiction. Things Fall Apart (1958) is the most widely read African novel, has been translated into over fifty languages, and has sold more than twenty million copies. Achebe's critical essays — particularly 'An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness' — established the terms of postcolonial literary criticism. Without him, it is difficult to imagine the development of African literature in the second half of the twentieth century.
