100 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 is broken to welcome a guest in Things Fall Apart, with the saying 'he who brings it brings life'?

Kola nut opens almost every visit in Umuofia: the two men politely argue over who should break it, and whoever does prays to the ancestors for life and health before it is shared.

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 through a Spectator advertisement took his fee and his sole copy, then went silent for months. Angela Beattie of the Nigerian Broadcasting Service had to call in person in London to shake it loose.

Which hip-hop band's 1999 album borrowed its name from Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart?

The Roots took the novel's name for their fourth album, which lost the Best Rap Album Grammy to Eminem's The Slim Shady LP yet became the band's breakthrough record.

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, alone understands her father's every mood. 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 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. A creditor circles his point in half a dozen proverbs before asking Unoka to repay a debt.

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 draws Nwoye 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', does a Mbanta convert 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?

The things that held us together, Okonkwo's closest friend says, were cut when the clan's own sons joined the stranger's religion, 'and we have fallen apart': 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, since men shoot without missing?

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 make up Umuofia because, in the clan's own telling, they grew out of the nine sons of its first father. Each sends one masked ancestral spirit to sit in judgment at the clan's court.

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 to take no part in Ikemefuna's death, saying 'That boy calls you father'?

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?

James Smith condemns his predecessor's policy of compromise, suspends a woman whose husband followed clan custom over their dead child, and lets his zealots provoke the clan. The church burns soon after.

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

Enoch, whom villagers called the outsider who wept louder than the bereaved, 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 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 that followed made the prophecy come true.

How do the court messengers cheat Umuofia over the Commissioner's fine?

Add fifty bags to it: the Commissioner asks for 200 bags of cowries, but his messengers, who shave and beat the six jailed leaders, tell Umuofia 250. The clan pays in full at once to free its men.

Which Joyce Cary novel, set in Nigeria, struck the student Achebe as so superficial that he resolved to write his own?

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: he comes home from an English education refusing bribes, then sinks into debt and takes one.

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

Pete Edochie was a broadcaster and administrator, not a career actor, and Okonkwo was his first screen role. Justus Esiri played Okonkwo's friend.

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 that several publishers had turned down. It has since been translated into more than fifty languages.

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, does the Mbanta church admit despite its converts' protests?

The osu, a caste set apart for the gods and barred from assemblies and from marrying the free-born, 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 used to tell the young Okonkwo what his father was. A man with no title and the clan's Oracle share one name.

What insulting nickname, mocking the colour of their uniform, does Umuofia give the District Commissioner's hated enforcers?

Ashy Buttocks is the name the kotma, as the clan calls them, earned with their ash-coloured shorts, and they beat prisoners who sing it in a work song. Umuofia hated them as arrogant, high-handed foreigners.

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 a man with two titles cuts off his anklet to join them.

Which tree does Okonkwo accuse his second wife of killing, though she had only cut a few leaves to wrap food?

A banana tree, in fact very much alive, is only his excuse: restless in the idle days before a feast, he would rather be working his farm, and the beating gives his temper an outlet.

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, must Okonkwo take to the earth goddess's shrine as a fine?

A she-goat heads the list the goddess's priest dictates before dusk, having refused Okonkwo's hospitality. An elder notes the penalty has grown mild: offenders were once dragged through the village until they 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 instrument does Okonkwo's debt-ridden father Unoka play, happiest among the village musicians after harvest?

A flute is Unoka's one joy, yet he dies deep in debt without a single title. Okonkwo, ashamed, builds his whole life on hating everything his father loved.

Which crop, left to the men of Umuofia to grow, fills the barns that prove Okonkwo's wealth?

Yams are a man's crop in Umuofia, while women tend cassava and beans; raising them takes so much labour that a full barn is the clan's proof of a hard worker.

Which British monarch does the District Commissioner invoke as he jails Umuofia's leaders?

Queen Victoria is the distant sovereign he invokes while lecturing six handcuffed elders on justice, which dates the story to before her death in 1901.

Which Joseph Conrad work did Chinua Achebe attack as racist in a landmark lecture at Amherst?

Heart of Darkness, Achebe argued, used Africa as a mere backdrop and stripped its people of their humanity; his lecture became a landmark of postcolonial criticism.

What is Ikemefuna told before the men of Umuofia lead him out of the village to be killed?

He is going home, Okonkwo tells the boy, who does not believe it; three years after arriving as a settlement between clans, he is cut down on the path.

Which W. B. Yeats poem, written just after the First World War, gave Things Fall Apart its title?

The Second Coming, Yeats's 1919 vision of order collapsing into anarchy, lent Achebe his image for a clan coming undone under colonial rule.

Which jailed future president said prison walls fell down in the company of Chinua Achebe?

Nelson Mandela spent 27 years as a prisoner in South Africa and remembered Achebe as the writer whose books made his cell walls seem to vanish.

In Things Fall Apart, what must Umuofia's children never do at night, in case evil spirits come?

Whistle after dark and a wicked spirit might answer, the villagers believed; even a snake went unnamed at night in case it heard, so moonless evenings were spent in hush.

Why does Okonkwo strike the killing blow himself when Ikemefuna runs to him for help?

He dreads looking weak, the terror that rules his whole life; an elder had warned him to take no part, and the act haunts him and estranges his son Nwoye.

In Things Fall Apart, which instrument does Okonkwo's debt-ridden father love to play at feasts?

The flute was his one joy: he would rather play it with the village musicians after harvest than farm, and he takes it with him when he is carried off to die.

In Things Fall Apart, which debtor, dead without a single title, is the father Okonkwo despises?

Unoka owed money to nearly every neighbour and died with no title at all, a shame that drives his son to value strength and success above everything else.

In which language did Chinua Achebe write Things Fall Apart while working for a Lagos radio service?

English was his choice because he found the standard written form of Igbo stilted, a patchwork of dialects, and it carried the story into more than fifty languages.

Which breakaway state did Things Fall Apart's author serve as ambassador during Nigeria's civil war?

Biafra broke away in 1967 and Achebe toured Europe and North America pleading its cause; when it fell in 1970 he went back to find his house destroyed.

Which plant does Okonkwo accuse one of his wives of killing as Umuofia readies its harvest feast?

A banana tree, and it was alive: she had only cut a few of its leaves to wrap food, yet he beat her in a burst of pent-up temper before the feast.

What first draws Okonkwo's son Nwoye to the missionaries, though the Trinity baffles him?

Their hymn moved him more than any argument: its poetry seemed to answer the grief over his dead foster brother that had haunted him.

Which Greek philosopher's model of the tragic hero, noble but flawed, is Okonkwo measured against?

Aristotle held that a tragic hero is a great man undone by a single flaw, and critics find Okonkwo's in his obsession with manliness.

Which American magazine put Things Fall Apart on its list of the 100 best novels since 1923?

Time chose it for a list covering 1923 to 2005, the years since the magazine's founding, and the BBC later named it among its 100 most influential novels.

What ruins Umuofia's harvest in the year young Okonkwo first borrows seed to farm as a sharecropper?

Drought, then floods made it the worst farming year in Umuofia's living memory, and surviving it on borrowed seed convinced Okonkwo that will alone conquers anything.

In Things Fall Apart, Ani, whose priest punishes Okonkwo for beating his wife, is goddess of what?

The earth is her realm, so she judges conduct as well as granting harvests; even an accidental killing pollutes her soil and must be atoned for.

What does the Oracle's priestess blame for the poor harvests of Okonkwo's father?

His own laziness, she snaps: he has offended no god, he simply takes the easy way out and sows exhausted land, so she sends him away to work.

In Things Fall Apart, which creator god does a village elder say made all of Umuofia's other gods?

Chukwu made the world and every lesser god, an elder tells the first white missionary, comparing the carved figures to messengers like the churchman himself.

Which bird in a Things Fall Apart folk tale twists Tortoise's message so he lands on hard objects?

Parrot took revenge for the birds Tortoise had cheated of a sky feast: told to ask for soft things, he asked for hard ones, and the shell broke into pieces on landing.

How does Umuofia classify Okonkwo's accidental killing of a clansman, unlike a deliberate murder?

A female crime is the clan's term for an unintended killing, so his exile lasts seven years and he may then return, a bitter label for a man obsessed with manliness.

Which interpreter is left in charge of Mbanta's new church, where Okonkwo's son Nwoye converts?

Mr. Kiaga, an Igbo convert, stays behind when the white missionary moves on, and he scandalises his own flock by welcoming the clan's outcasts as equals.

In Things Fall Apart, how do two families haggle over a bride-price without speaking a figure aloud?

Passing sticks back and forth lets each side raise or cut the offer in silence, every stick standing for bags of cowries, and once the count is agreed the men feast.

In Things Fall Apart, how do the court messengers first humiliate Umuofia's six imprisoned leaders?

Shave them bald, then starve and beat them for days: the guards do everything the Commissioner promised would not happen, and Okonkwo leaves jail set on revenge.

In Things Fall Apart, what do the white men open in Umuofia that brings money flowing into the clan?

A trading store made the oil and kernels of the palm fetch high prices for the first time, which is why many villagers thought the newcomers were no bad thing.

Which speech trait makes Okonkwo reach for his fists whenever he grows angry in Things Fall Apart?

A slight stammer trips him up whenever he is angry, and when the words will not come fast enough he lets his fists finish the argument.

Where has the missionary sent Okonkwo's convert son Nwoye by the time the family returns from exile?

A teaching college in a distant town is where he now studies under a new baptismal name, news that makes Okonkwo throw the missionary out of his compound.

Which Achebe novel, his third, completes the African Trilogy begun by Things Fall Apart?

Arrow of God follows a chief priest in the 1920s who refuses to serve the colonial administration and is jailed for it, a generation after Okonkwo's clan first met the missionaries.

Which paperback list was launched in 1962 with Things Fall Apart as its very first title?

African Writers Series paperbacks reissued novels once sold only as costly hardbacks, and Achebe himself served as the list's first editorial adviser.

Which Igbo town, the ancestral home where Chinua Achebe grew up, is also where he was buried?

Ogidi shaped the village world of his fiction: he grew up there among both churchgoers and keepers of the old religion, and its people later made him a chief.

Which literary honour did Chinua Achebe win in 2007, although the Nobel always eluded him?

Man Booker International Prize judges chose him in June 2007, and one of them, Nadine Gordimer, called him the father of modern African literature.

Which future Nobel laureate had a supporting role in the 1961 radio play of Things Fall Apart?

Wole Soyinka, then a young playwright and poet, acted in the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation's version, which went out under the hero's name, Okonkwo.

In Things Fall Apart, Umuofia's most feared war medicine draws on the spirit of which figure?

A one-legged old woman gives the charm its name, agadi-nwayi, and neighbours fear it so much that they offer terms instead of fighting.

In Things Fall Apart, which body parts are white men rumoured to lack before Umuofia has seen one?

Toes were what the travellers' tales left out, because the strangers kept their feet in shoes; the men laugh the stories off as too absurd to be true.

Which trait of Okonkwo do his wives spot in one of Umuofia's masked ancestral spirits at a trial?

His springy walk gives him away, and he is missing from the elders' seats, yet the women keep the thought to themselves.

Which runaway animal empties the kitchens at a bride's feast in Things Fall Apart?

A cow got loose in a neighbour's crops, and custom required all the women who could be spared to drive it back; its owner then paid a heavy fine.

What must Uzowulu bring his in-laws to regain his beaten wife, by the spirits' ruling in Umuofia?

A gift of wine and a plea for her return are all the court demands of him, and one elder wonders aloud why so small a case reached the spirits at all.

Which wealthy man of Umuofia lends the young Okonkwo the seed for his first sharecropped farm?

Nwakibie had turned other young men away, but Okonkwo's earnestness won him twice the seed he had hoped for, on terms that left him only a third of the crop.

Which son of Okonkwo's closest friend wins his wrestling bout at the harvest festival in Umuofia?

Maduka's victory so pleases Okonkwo that he praises the boy to his father, then complains that his own eldest son shows no such promise.

What admiring nickname does Okonkwo's favourite daughter earn in Mbanta during the family's exile?

Crystal of Beauty was once her mother's nickname too; suitors ask for her hand, but she refuses them all so that she can marry back in Umuofia.

In Things Fall Apart, which sacred tree shelters the spirits of good children waiting to be born?

The silk-cotton, named for the silky fibres around its seeds, is revered in the wrestling chapter as the dwelling of children not yet born.

In Things Fall Apart, which disease does Umuofia politely call the white skin?

Leprosy went by that gentle name, so when the men first hear of pale strangers, one jokes that he already knows such a man: the village leper.

What do the men of Umuofia do to Okonkwo's compound the morning after his family flees?

They pull it all down, burning his houses and killing his animals, not as revenge but as the justice their goddess prescribes for a killing.

Which dry, dusty wind off the Sahara gives its name to the cold season in Things Fall Apart?

Harmattan winds carry Saharan dust toward the Atlantic from about November to March, so Umuofia's cold season arrives once the harvest is safely in.

In the District Commissioner's planned book title, what is being done to the Lower Niger tribes?

Pacification is his word for it: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, a title that hands the story's last, cold irony to the coloniser.

Under which first name was Things Fall Apart's author baptised by his Christian convert parents?

Albert was the name on his baptismal record, beside the Igbo name Chinualumogu; the world came to know him by a shortened form of the latter.

Which red dye do the women in Things Fall Apart rub on their skin before a celebration?

Cam wood, ground from a West African redwood, reddens the skin as a base coat; the women then draw other patterns over it for special occasions.

In Things Fall Apart, what are the jigida that a bride puts on for her suitor's visit?

Waist beads threaded in their hundreds on each string and worn snugly, part of the finery a bride puts on when her suitor's family arrives to bargain.

Into whose care does Okonkwo place the boy Ikemefuna on bringing him back to Umuofia?

His senior wife, the mother of Nwoye, takes the frightened boy in, and her son and the newcomer are soon as close as brothers.