Introduction

When I’m describing this period, you must understand that this is in
retrospect; at no point at the time was I sure where things were going.
If anybody had asked me, “Will this book be published?” to me, I
would not have known whether or not it would be. OK. Finally, the
publisher in London said “Yes, we will take it” – but will it be a
success? To me, just being published was a success. It could have died
a death the next day. Everything was tentative, new, surprising,
actually, almost crazy. Because it seemed that, in the future, very
strange things would happen to this book. I’m surprised that the things
that did happen to it did not end its life, because it could have hap-
pened that way too.1

F
IFTY YEARS AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF THINGS FALL APART,
Chinua Achebe could still recall, in his typically poignant and under-
stated way, the feelings of euphoria and cautionary realism of a young
writer about to see his lovingly created first novel enter the world. Like any
writer being published for the first time, Achebe conveys the excitement as
well as the tentative knowledge that the vagaries of the literary world mean
that his efforts were also likely to disappear without trace. The possibility that
his novel would find an audience, either at home in Nigeria or outside Africa,
must have appeared highly unlikely. The market for literary fiction in Nigeria
at the time was very small, particularly if it was a book like Things Fall Apart
costing fifteen shillings, a price far beyond the means of the average Nigerian.

1
Chinua Achebe, in conversation with Simon Gikandi, at the conference “Things
Fall Apart: 1958–2008,” 11 October 2008, published under the title “Fifty Years of
Things Fall Apart (1958). An Interview with Chinua Achebe” in Wasafiri 59 (Autumn
2009): 4–7; here 6.
x CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART, 1958–2008 

European interest in its colonies was still intense in the postwar years, parti-
cularly as these colonies were demonstrably slipping away in the heat of the
independence movements that were reaching their often explosive denoue-
ment across Europe’s fading empires. Books about Africa by Europeans re-
mained extremely popular in the West, especially if they involved the exploits
of big-game hunters or recounted lurid adventures among the primitive and
exotic natives. The memoirs of returned missionaries and colonial officials
also remained popular in Europe, together with the emergence of a conside-
rable market for histories of the war, military memoirs, and even popular
fiction set in wartime Africa. However, the idea that a novel by an unknown
young writer from Nigeria, a book that confronted the unacknowledged
legacy of colonial conquest from an African perspective, must have appeared
a most unlikely prospect for survival, let alone literary success, in the West.
Achebe was not the first African novelist to have his work published, of
course, but he was certainly among a small number to have done so when
Things Fall Apart was published in 1958. The years following the Second
World War were witnessing the first sustained flowering of modern sub-Saha-
ran African literature, and scattered across the continent a small number of
writers were producing groundbreaking works to considerable acclaim: the
anglophone writers Peter Abrahams, Ezekiel Mphahlele, and Can Themba in
South Africa; the francophone writers Mongo Beti in Cameroon and Camara
Laye in Guinea, together with Ousmane Sembène and the poets Léon Damas
Gontran and Léopold Sédar Senghor in Senegal, to name but a few. Achebe
had also witnessed the improbable success of his countryman, Amos Tutuola,
arguably modern African literature’s first internationally celebrated novelist,
who had already had three novels published to wide acclaim in Europe and
America. Unlike Tutuola’s idiosyncratic re-workings of traditional Yorùbá
folktales, however, Things Fall Apart was a novel that immediately declared
its serious intent. At a time when the Nigerian nationalist movement was on
the eve of achieving its long fought-for goal of independence from colonial
rule, Achebe, auspiciously, cast his eye back to the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury and the epochal moment when the British colonizers first arrived in what
was then the Igbo territories of south-eastern Nigeria. This was not a work de-
scribing the arrival of a benevolent colonial power, come to liberate and edu-
cate, as had been portrayed in numerous works by European missionaries,
explorers, and colonial officials. The unique achievement of Things Fall
Apart was that it was the first anglophone African novel to set out consciously
to restore a sense of humanity and history to precolonial Africa, and to docu-
 Introduction xi

ment how Africans perceived the arrival of the colonizing Other. Achebe
created a narrative that placed the African at the historic centre of the colonial
encounter, with the imperialistic Europeans as the usurping outsiders, whose
intervention brings about cataclysmic upheaval for the traditional African
civilization being colonized.
At the heart of Things Fall Apart is the story of Okonkwo, one of the most
compelling fictional creations in all of modern African literature. The novel
opens with a description of Okonkwo which immediately foregrounds his
heroic persona, portraying him as a symbolic embodiment of the values and
ideals of his village. Okonkwo is presented as a man destined for greatness as
a result of his conformity to his society’s ideals of masculine worth and
achievement. His high status within his culture is largely measured in relation
to his success in the male realms of wrestling and warfare, and against the cul-
ture’s patriarchal systems of sanctioning titles, polygyny, and wealth accumu-
lation. However, no sooner are we made aware of his potentially iconic status
than we are informed that Okonkwo is a deeply flawed individual. As the nar-
rative unfolds we come to understand that the nature of his tragic character is
related to the way he chooses to narrowly interpret his society’s ideals of the
‘masculine’ and his disavowal of the culture’s ‘feminine’ values and prin-
ciples. Flawed he may be, but Okonkwo is also an heroic defender of his own
culture and people, against what he correctly intuits is an invading force that
will bring about the demise of their way of life. The ignominious suicide of
Okonkwo, who is the symbolic embodiment of his people, can also be read as
signifying the emasculation of the Umuofians. As their traditional way of life
is irrevocably changed by the arrival of British missionaries and colonial of-
ficials, it triggers a crisis in the culture as a consequence of the latter’s inflex-
ibility and internal inconsistencies. Although the novel ends in an unmistak-
ably elegiac tone, when one considers the narrative in its entirety it is clear
that Achebe is by no means uncritical of the culture that he both celebrates
and mourns. It is this ambivalence that helps to give the work such power and
relevance today, with so many countries still struggling to come to terms with
the legacy of their colonial histories, and with the process of decolonization
continuing in former colonies around the world.
From what Achebe recalls as inauspicious beginnings, Things Fall Apart
did become an enormously successful novel, in terms both of its readership
and of its critical standing around the world. The reasons for the novel’s
longevity and success are varied, and I can only outline a few of the major
ones here. Initially, at least, one of the most important reasons that Things
xii CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART, 1958–2008 

Fall Apart had not “died the next day,” as Achebe had feared, was the rather
fortuitous decision of his publisher Heinemann to set up the African Writers
Series, with Achebe appointed as Series Editor, a position he held from 1962
to 1990. The first book published in the series in 1962 was Things Fall Apart,
and it was marketed across anglophone Africa as an affordable paperback.
Heinemann had already built a profitable operation selling educational text-
books on the continent, and the A W S was aimed at an emerging market for
indigenous literature, particularly in the schools and universities of the newly
independent nations. Where school and university curricula had been largely
based on European models under colonial rule, a process of ‘africanization’
that began with independence was gradually to bring important changes. In
university English departments, for example, there was a shift from an almost
exclusive concentration on studying the linguistics of the imposed linguae
francae of the colonizers and the ‘great works’ of European literature. Along-
side these disciplines were introduced the study of the linguistics of African
languages, the study of the oral traditions of indigenous cultures, and engage-
ment with literature written by Africans. Things Fall Apart, naturally, became
one of the first African works to be included on the curricula for schools and
universities on the continent.
In the West, a parallel shift in the critical study of literatures was taking
place. An increasing awareness of the literatures produced in the former colo-
nies led, for example, to the development of Commonwealth literary studies
in Britain and the other countries of the former Empire. The rise of compara-
tive literary studies and cultural studies increasingly introduced interdiscipli-
nary approaches to the study of literature from across cultures. Indeed, inter-
disciplinary theoretical approaches typify what are now known as postcolo-
nial or world literary studies. While these academic fields are often subject to
critical debate (both from within and without) around questions of how to de-
fine and characterize the disciplines, what is usually not in dispute is that
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is now a key text studied in these fields. What is
surprising is that the novel is now not only studied on literature courses, but is
just as likely to be found being studied or cited in the academic fields of
sociology, anthropology, ethnography, cultural studies, and religious studies,
as well as in courses on African philosophy.
To celebrate and commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication
of Achebe’s remarkable first novel, Professor Lyn Innes organized the con-
ference “Things Fall Apart: 1958 – 2008” in London in October 2008. The
occasion drew writers, scholars, students, publishers, Africanists, and the
 Introduction xiii

novel’s admirers from all around the world. The conference was also hon-
oured to have Chinua Achebe in attendance and to hear him discuss his novel,
with great humour and insight, with Professor Simon Gikandi. Over the two
days of the conference, participants presented over thirty papers on a diverse
series of topics, and the present selection offers some of the most innovative
and insightful of these essays.
While in London for the conference, Chinua Achebe attended a number of
celebratory functions, and the book opens with a fascinating, insightful, and
wide-ranging interview with Achebe that was conducted, under the aegis of
Newcastle University, by the renowned Malaŵian poet and writer Jack
Mapanje and the celebrated British writer Laura Fish. The interview begins
with Achebe discussing the literary and political milieu in Africa at the time
that he was first writing, together with the inspiration that he found in poetry,
particularly that of W.B. Yeats, and its influence on Things Fall Apart. He
also provides his candid reactions and response to some of the recent feminist
criticism of himself and his novel. He goes on to discuss his belief in the
moral imperative to empathize with others and the responsibility of artists to
articulate the Other in their work. In a reiteration of a theme that has been at
the heart of his literary practice and theoretical writings, Achebe elaborates
his views on the importance of the role of the writer in African society and in
the process of nationalist renewal and decolonization. He discusses, with evi-
dent amusement, the sometimes prophetic nature of some of his own fiction.
Nigeria is never far from Achebe’s thoughts, and he provides his considered
views on the contentious issue of religion in the country and a timely plea for
tolerance. He gives his thoughts on the future of African literature and con-
cludes with a discussion of his views on the problems of the Nigerian pub-
lishing industry today and the threat that it poses to writers there.
As one of the foundational texts of postcolonial literature, Things Fall
Apart has received much critical attention since it was published, and the first
group of essays here presents several contemporary critical responses to the
novel in a section titled “Approaches to Things Fall Apart.” The first essay is
Mick Jardine’s “Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, and the Politics of Magic,”
in which he examines Achebe’s subtly political and ideologically charged
representations of magic in the novel. He argues that Achebe challenged and
countered Western notions of the primitive nature of traditional African cul-
tures and the Europeans’ differentiation between the legitimacy of their own
religion and the Africans’ ‘barbaric’ belief in supernatural forces and ‘magic’.
Jardine deconstructs the complex ways in which the narrative voice in the
xiv CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART, 1958–2008 

novel presents the religious practices and beliefs of the Igbos, and argues that
Achebe discovered the means of conveying his own scepticism while cele-
brating the interaction between the belief in magical power and in human re-
sponsibility that characterizes traditional Igbo culture. Traditional Igbo beliefs
take on an important political rhetoric in this cogent analysis, and Jardine con-
cludes that Achebe accomplishes the difficult balancing act of countering the
charge that an immature Africa has stood outside the flow of history by
inventing a way of writing which defied Western attempts to infantilize
Africa.
The work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the Subaltern Studies group
has been one of the most influential interventions in the development of post-
colonial studies, and in Rashna Singh’s essay “The Art of Conversation: How
the Subaltern speaks in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Joseph Con-
rad’s Heart of Darkness” she examines how a subalternist approach can be
deployed, to radical effect, in deconstructing representations of discourse and
speech in the two novels. Singh argues that Conrad re-inscribes colonial
domination, even while exposing its most egregious practices, by refusing
speech and logocentric expression to his African characters. By permitting
them to ‘speak’ only through their bodies, he isolates them as subaltern in
what Spivak has called “a space of difference,” but Singh posits that this be-
comes an ambiguous space in the novella. This is contrasted with Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart, in which the Igbo are represented within a normative space
and communicate through transactional speech. Singh persuasively concludes
that Achebe’s novel uses discourse and speech to subvert the “writ of colo-
nialist power” (Homi Bhabha) implicit in Conrad’s novel by re-inscribing its
identifications into strategies of subversion.
Michel Naumann’s essay “The Semantic Structure of Things Fall Apart
and Its Historical Meaning” argues that one of the principal aims of Achebe’s
novel was to rehabilitate African cultures, but that it is also, on its structural
level, a novel which analyzes the anticolonial movement in Nigeria and anti-
cipates the pitfalls of neocolonial independence. Naumann’s innovative thesis
begins by analyzing the semantic structure of the relations between the char-
acters, in a development of the ideas of the Romanian literary critic Lucien
Goldmann, and concludes that it can be defined as an ‘ironic structure’, in that
Okonkwo unwittingly produces the opposite response in his people to what he
had intended. He then situates the novel within the politics of the anticolonial
independence movement in Nigeria during the postwar years and argues that,
on a political level, it both perceives the ambiguities of the times in which it
 Introduction xv

was written and anticipates the crisis in the process of national construction in
the country.
Things Fall Apart came to hold an important position of influence for the
wider movement for cultural renewal in Africa, and the last essay in this sec-
tion, “The Politics of Form: Uche Okeke’s Illustrations for Achebe’s Things
Fall Apart” by Chika Okeke–Agulu, examines the ‘creative dialogue’ that
took place when Achebe, in acknowledgment of their shared artistic vision,
asked Uche Okeke to create illustrations for the novel’s second edition in the
Heinemann African Writers Series. Through an analysis of the five drawings
that he produced to illustrate the book, Okeke-Agulu shows how Okeke used
the occasion to announce his own experiment with a new formal language,
similar to Achebe’s approach to the English language. Okeke-Agulu under-
takes a comparative reading of Okeke’s illustrations and those of Denis Carra-
dine, who provided the illustrations for the first A W S edition of Things Fall
Apart, arguing that the radical formalism and postcolonial sensibility of
Okeke’s drawings become apparent. Okeke–Agulu concludes that the formal
conditions and ideological tenor of Okeke’s illustrations constitute equi-
valents of Achebe’s own seminal contribution to postcolonial literary modern-
ism, for which Things Fall Apart was the inceptive gesture.
Things Fall Apart has proved to be a remarkably influential work, not only
for later generations of Nigerian and African authors, but also for writers from
around the world wanting to address not only the impact of colonial occupa-
tion on indigenous societies, but also cultural and religious conflict and
familial and intergenerational tensions. One of the most successful of the
latest generation of Nigerian writers to acknowledge their indebtedness to
Achebe has been Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and two of the essays in the
next section, “Things Fall Apart and its Literary Heritage,” examine the influ-
ence of his work on Adichie’s novels. The first essay in this section is Chris-
topher Ouma’s “Daughters of Sentiment, Genealogies, and Conversations
between Things Fall Apart and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple
Hibiscus,” in which he identifies the literary, personal, and cultural influences
of Achebe on Adichie, together with the dialogue that Adichie’s Purple Hibis-
cus sets up with Things Fall Apart, as acts of (re-)creating the genealogy of
the father and the daughter in African literature. For Ouma, the representa-
tions of filial relationships in the two novels demonstrate how depictions of
fathers and daughters in African literature are significantly pooling into a con-
tinuous discourse on genealogies, traditions, and canons. He posits that the
image of the father as stoic, persevering, canonical, and traditionally influen-
xvi CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART, 1958–2008 

tial has something intriguing in its clutch and tenacity: while sons always
need to proclaim autonomy from the patriarchal father-figure, daughters
constantly grapple with it more subtly through attachment, seeking its af-
firmation, while exposing more nuanced perspectives in the relationship.
Ouma argues that the ‘daughters of sentiment’ (Lynda Zwinger) found in the
representations of Okonkwo’s relationship with Ezinma in Things Fall Apart
and Papa Eugene’s relationship with Kambili in Purple Hibiscus represent the
possibility of an androgynous genealogy-in-the-making, in which the fictional
daughter embodies a patrilineal heritage, thereby problematizing her emplace-
ment in the genealogically patrilineal familial line.
The second essay addressing the influence of Things Fall Apart on Adi-
chie’s work is David Whittaker’s “The Novelist as Teacher: Things Fall
Apart and the Hauntology of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow
Sun,” in which he postulates that the contemporary renaissance in the Nige-
rian novel has problematized Achebe’s vision of the role of the African writer
in a number of important ways. He begins by describing why Things Fall
Apart should be regarded as the first incarnation of an influential African
literary aesthetic that was developed by Achebe in his theoretical writings and
later fiction. For Achebe, African writers have a crucial role to play in the
process of nationalist renewal and decolonization, based on their socio-politi-
cal role and a didactic literary programme of recuperation and (re-)education.
Whittaker argues that the contemporary renaissance in the Nigerian novel has
problematized Achebe’s literary manifesto calling for a radical applied litera-
ture in Africa, with a younger generation of writers often displaying quite dif-
ferent literary sensibilities and diasporic perspectives. However, he also
argues that there is compelling evidence of the enduring influence of
Achebe’s radical literary aesthetic in a work like Adichie’s Half of a Yellow
Sun, which can be understood as being ‘haunted’ by the ghost of Okonkwo
and the marginalized and voiceless spectres of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
He concludes that one of Adichie’s achievements in Half of a Yellow Sun is to
create an inverted mirror-image, a subverted double of Things Fall Apart, by
narrating the story from the subaltern positions elided in Achebe’s hierarchy
of fictional voices.
The final essay in this section is Malika Rebai Maamri’s “Re-Inventing
Africa: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la
fantasia,” in which she reveals the debt, often ambivalent and aggressive, that
Djebar’s novel displays with regard to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, particu-
larly in relation to its discourse of ‘silenced’ women. The affirmation of Afri-
 Introduction xvii

can culture initiated by Achebe has found echoes all around the world, and
Maamri argues that it is no coincidence that Assia Djebar, a francophone Al-
gerian woman writer who stands between the centre and the periphery, also
sought to ‘reinvent’ Algeria. In bringing repressed colonial histories to light,
she posits that Djebar’s and Achebe’s novels move between the dialectical
poles of cultural assertion, on the one hand, and cultural demystification, on
the other. Maamri’s essay joins a number of important feminist critiques of
Things Fall Apart by arguing that when Achebe attempted to restore his own
Igbo culture and history, he represented women as subaltern subjects in the
range of discourses in the novel. Her reading details how Djebar reconsidered
and re-narrated the legacy of French colonialism that had altered the identity
of Algeria, and, like Achebe, she attempts to wrest identity from the vagaries
of biculturality (and patriarchy). She argues that Djebar offers an alternative
vision, a revisionist picture of the attitudes of traditional women to their status
in African societies, one committed to challenging the picture limned in
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
The reception and teaching of the novel in other cultural and pedagogical
domains is the theme of the third section of the collection, “Things Fall Apart
in Other Contexts.” The first essay here is Bernth Lindfors’s “Teaching
Things Fall Apart in Texas,” which describes an inductive method of teaching
the novel that makes use of nineteenth-century accounts of Africa and Afri-
cans written by European and American natural scientists, missionaries, ex-
plorers, historians, and creative writers. Lindfors provides an insightful ana-
lysis of several key nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century primary sources
that reveal the disparaging racist ideologies of Western stereotypes of Afri-
cans. He contrasts these Western notions of the ‘dark continent’ and its in-
habitants with what his students learned about the African society and indivi-
duals depicted in Achebe’s novel.
In “First and Second Glances: Working-Class Scottish Readers and Things
Fall Apart,” Andrew Smith reflects on the reading of the novel by a variety of
largely working-class Scottish readers who participated in the community-
education courses in which he was involved for six years. His research em-
phasizes the active, interrogative, and sometimes implicitly critical nature of
the encounter. Smith argues that this active ‘making sense’ of Achebe’s
novel, and the historical events it describes, was not a process which pro-
ceeded in a kind of intellectual seclusion, but was clearly related to those
readers’ on-going attempts to make sense of their own subjective experiences,
and those of the communities and localities of which they were a part. The
xviii CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART, 1958–2008 

essay explores how the active process of interpretation undertaken by these

readers challenges our expectations of literary consumption and highlights the
question of the cross-cultural reception of postcolonial fiction in the contem-
porary world.
The final essay in this section is Russell McDougall’s “Things Fall Apart:
Culture, Anthropology, and Literature,” in which he looks at the history of the
novel’s changing reception and valency, and the different contexts in which it
has been placed, particularly in terms of the shifting relations between the
disciplines of anthropology and literary criticism. At the heart of McDougall’s
polemical thesis is an analysis of how Achebe’s novel has increasingly be-
come a ‘text’ that is read and situated within the globalized academy of trans-
disciplinary studies in a variety of educational and artistic contexts. He postu-
lates that resituating Things Fall Apart primarily in terms of transdisciplinary
globalization studies risks stripping the novel of its historical and literary
power, as well as of the context in which it was written and produced.
McDougall argues that this development may also empty the colonial moment
of its political significance, particularly in terms of African history. He coun-
ters this by also conceding that there are a number of ways in which such
interdisciplinary readings can produce interesting and productive readings.
His essay ends with a consideration of the novel’s critical trajectory in Austra-
lia and how its powerful delineation of the psychological damage wrought by
colonialism and its material effects have a particular relevance to the coun-
try’s attempts at reconciliation with Indigenous Australians.
One way of measuring the phenomenal success of Things Fall Apart
around the world is the fact that it has been translated into an estimated
forty-five different languages, and the final section, “Things Fall Apart in
Translation,” undertakes a much-needed examination of this important area
in the life of the novel. The first essay is Waltraud Kolb’s “Re-Writing
Things Fall Apart in German,” in which she discusses the two German
translations of Things Fall Apart (1959/1983) and their reception by readers
and literary critics. She points out that readers are rarely aware of the
power, and responsibility, inherent in the role of translators as negotiators
and re-writers of literary texts and as re-creators of cultural representations.
Kolb draws on recent approaches to translation in a postcolonial context and
on Umberto Eco’s notion of translation as a process of negotiation, and, in
particular, examines the radically different strategies adopted by the Ger-
man translators in re-writing the Igbo metaphors and proverbs that are such
an important aspect of the novel. She traces the various ways in which the
 Introduction xix

translators re-wrote and re-created cultural images for their readers, oscillat-
ing between the foreign and the familiar, and thereby gauges their success
or failure to “carry the African writer’s peculiar experience” (Achebe), as
the original does.
The second essay in this section is Dorota Gołuch’s “Chinua Achebe
Translating, Translating Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart in Polish and
the Task of Postcolonial Translation,” in which she discusses two Polish
translations of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1989/2009). Gołuch
states that the purpose of her essay is twofold: to seek to shed light on the
presence and influence of Things Fall Apart in Poland; and to address the
question of the relevance of domesticating and foreignizing strategies to the
task of postcolonial translation. She characterizes Achebe’s text as an act of
intercultural and literary translation, in order to compare his ‘strategies’
with those of his Polish translators. Gołuch postulates that, from a postcolo-
nial perspective, domestication appears detrimental to the book’s message,
yet she speculates that, when considering the effects of such domesticating
translation strategies, one needs to read a translation in the context of the
target culture’s norms and conventions. She interrogates current assump-
tions that domestication perpetuates imperialist or discriminatory attitudes
whereas foreignization fosters intercultural understanding and, as such, is
the preferred strategy for the future. Gołuch concludes by asking if there is a
correlation between particular strategies of translatorial representation, in-
creased knowledge of foreign cultures, and a genuine human understanding
leading to tolerance.
In 2008, at the conference which provided the inspiration for this col-
lection of essays, Chinua Achebe could reflect back on his thoughts as a
young writer and his belief, at the time, that “it seemed very strange things
would happen to this book.” Indeed, that prediction has proved to be correct.
Things Fall Apart is a novel that “could have died the next day” but has gone
on to become the most celebrated and best-known work of African fiction
today, read all over the world and translated into numerous languages. It is a
work that continues to fascinate readers and inspire literary critics and post-
colonial theorists, while becoming a text that is studied in a variety of aca-
demic fields in schools and universities around the world. Marking the fiftieth
anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart, this collection of essays
aims to commemorate what is widely regarded as one of the great works of
twentieth-century literature. The hope is that these essays will add to our
understanding and appreciation of the novel, and may inform future scholars
xx CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART, 1958–2008 

and students who will be studying this work in the years ahead. From uncer-
tain beginnings, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart remains in good health
today, and now looks certain to go on being read and enjoyed for many years
to come.

DAVID WHITTAKER
OCTOBER 2010
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.