Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe is arguably the world’s most widely-read African author. Born in Nigeria in 1930, he belonged to the Igbo people, the same community at the center of Things Fall Apart—though in the book the tribal name is stylized as “Ibo.” Notwithstanding that he was born roughly 40 years after the events in Things Fall Apart, Achebe experienced firsthand many of the same political, cultural, and religious divides found at the heart of the novel. For example, around 1900 Achebe’s father Isaiah became one of his community’s earliest converts to Christianity. A Protestant who raised his son in the Christian Church, Isaiah nevertheless continued to honor the traditions of Odinani, his ancestors’ traditional faith. This balance between Western and African traditions is reflected in Achebe’s full name, Albert Chinualumogu Achebe. While Albert is a European name, Chinualumogu is a traditional Odinani prayer that means “God is fighting on my behalf.”

The man Achebe would grow into reflected this uneasy balance between Igbo traditions and the West. The author refused to go by Albert, changing his name to an abbreviation of his middle name, Chinua. Achebe’s rebellion against the Christian name given to him by his father is an inversion of the relationship between

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