Things Fall Apart Trivia
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100 free Things Fall Apart trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Things Fall Apart is the novel that gave the colonised a narrator. Chinua Achebe wrote it in his twenties, partly in answer to the British novels that had cast Nigerians as comic or savage, and told the story of Okonkwo, a self-made man of the Umuofia clan, from inside a village that has its own law, oracles, sayings and seasons long before the first white man arrives. These 100 questions follow the book from Okonkwo's wrestling fame to his exile and return, through the customs Achebe records in such detail, the people around him and the proverbs that carry the clan's wisdom, to the missionaries, the court and the District Commissioner's last sentence. A final stretch covers where the title came from, how the manuscript nearly vanished in London, the first printing, and the novel's life on stage, radio, screen and a famous hip-hop record. It suits anyone who read the book at school and wants to test what stuck, a literature class looking for a warm-up, or a pub quiz team with a strong reader on it.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does the District Commissioner decide Okonkwo's story deserves in his planned book?
A reasonable paragraph
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.
Q 02What 'iron horse' do villagers in Things Fall Apart tie to a tree after killing its white rider?
A bicycle
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.
Q 03Which wrestler, unbeaten for seven years, did Okonkwo throw at eighteen in Things Fall Apart?
Amalinze
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.
Q 04What accident at an elder's funeral gets Okonkwo banished from Umuofia for seven years?
His gun explodes
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.
Q 05In Things Fall Apart, which land do Mbanta's elders give the missionaries, expecting them dead in four days?
The Evil Forest
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.
Q 06Which nut is broken to welcome a guest in Things Fall Apart, with the saying 'he who brings it brings life'?
Kola nut
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.
Q 07Which phrase follows 'Things fall apart' in the Yeats line that gives Achebe's novel its title?
the centre cannot hold
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.
Q 08What kind of London business nearly lost the only handwritten manuscript of Things Fall Apart in 1957?
A typing agency
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.
Q 09Which hip-hop band's 1999 album borrowed its name from Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart?
The Roots
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.
Q 10What does Okonkwo's uncle say the common Igbo name Nneka means, in his lesson to the newly arrived exiles?
Mother is Supreme
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.
Q 11What baptismal name does Okonkwo's son Nwoye take after leaving home for the missionaries?
Isaac
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'.
Q 12Which daughter does Okonkwo keep thinking 'should have been a boy' in Things Fall Apart?
Ezinma
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.
Q 13Which missionary wins Umuofia's respect by treading softly on its faith and building a school and hospital?
Mr. Brown
Q 21What does Umuofia do with newborn twins, a custom that draws Nwoye toward the church?
Leaves them out in the bush
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.
Q 22Which creature, 'the emanation of the god of water', does a Mbanta convert kill, enraging the clan?
The royal python
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.
Q 23Okonkwo's closest friend says the white man 'has put a knife on' what?
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.
Q 14Why can Okonkwo's clansmen not cut down his body, leaving the task to the District Commissioner's men?
Suicide is an abomination
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.
Q 15What does Okonkwo do to the messenger who orders Umuofia's last great meeting to disperse?
Beheads him
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.
Q 16During which sacred observance does Okonkwo beat his youngest wife for going off to plait her hair?
The Week of Peace
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.
Q 17In the Igbo proverb Things Fall Apart quotes, what 'says yes also' when a man says yes?
His chi
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.
Q 18In Things Fall Apart, proverbs are 'the palm-oil with which' what 'are eaten'?
Words
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.
Q 19What descends on Umuofia 'once in a generation' and is roasted as a rare delicacy in Things Fall Apart?
Locusts
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.
Q 20Which masked figures, who judge disputes in Umuofia, does a convert unmask in Things Fall Apart?
The egwugwu
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.
The things that held us together
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.
Q 24Who tells the District Commissioner, beside Okonkwo's body, 'That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia'?
Obierika
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.
Q 25What has Eneke the bird learned, in a Things Fall Apart proverb, since men shoot without missing?
To fly without perching
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.
Q 26How many villages make up the Umuofia clan that Okonkwo is famous throughout as Things Fall Apart opens?
Nine
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.
Q 27Besides the boy Ikemefuna, what does Mbaino hand to Umuofia to atone for the murder of Udo's wife?
A young virgin
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.
Q 28Which elder warns Okonkwo to take no part in Ikemefuna's death, saying 'That boy calls you father'?
Ezeudu
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.
Q 29Which uncle, the oldest of his mother's kinsmen, receives Okonkwo and his family in Mbanta?
Uchendu
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.
Q 30Which missionary, who 'saw things as black and white', succeeds Umuofia's gentler first clergyman?
James Smith
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.