Things Fall Apart

Ikemefuna is a positive influence on Nwoye, and both spend time doing “masculine tasks” and sitting with their father in the evenings (52). Okonkwo is happy to see his son grow manly and express frustration with “his women-folk,” whom he needs to be able to “rule” if he wants to be “really a man” (53). He tells both boys “masculine stories of violence and bloodshed” to encourage this mindset (53). Nwoye secretly still prefers his mother’s stories of animals and of the Earth and Sky. As “moons” and “seasons” pass, though, he keeps this preference a secret, in an attempt to see his father happy (54).

After the harvest, when the “cold harmattan season” begins, the locusts, which “[come] once in a generation,” arrive (54). “Suddenly,” like “a shadow fell on the world,” the locusts rain down, hiding the sun (55). After the first swarm, an even larger group, “a slowly-moving mass like a boundless sheet of black cloud,” descends on Umuofia (56). It is “a tremendous sight, full of power and beauty” (56).

People gather the locusts to eat with palm-oil. One day, Okonkwo is eating with Ikemefuna and Nwoye when Ezeudu, an old man, comes to warn him that Umuofia, in the name of the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves, has decided to kill Ikemefuna.