I N T R O D U C T I O N BY CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE ---- When, in 1958, the London publishers William Heinemann received a manuscript of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart , they were unsure whether to publish it. The central question, according to editor Alan Hill, was this: 'Would anyone possibly buy a novel by an African?' Not only were there a mere handful of examples of African writing in English at the time -- such as Amos Tutuola's surreal The Palm-Wine Drinkard and Cyprian Ekwensi's novel of contemporary Lagos, People of the City -- but none of them had the ambition, the subtlety, or the confidence of Things Fall Apart. Chinua Achebe had initially conceived it as a story of three generations: a man in pre-colonial Igboland who struggles against the changes brought by the first European missionaries and administrators; his son who converts to Christianity and receives some Western education; and his grandson who is educated in England and is living the life of the new elite on the cusp of independence. Achebe later scaled down the novel, focusing only on the first generation, to produce a carefully observed story of the African European colonial encounter set among the Igbo people of south-eastern Nigeria in the 1890s, with the tragic hero Okonkwo at its center. Achebe's second novel, No Longer at Ease, would skip a generation and tell the story of Okonkwo's grandson, Obi, a civil servant in 1950s Lagos. His third novel, Arrow of God, about an Igbo priest and a British district officer in 1920s Igboland, can be read as representative of the times of Okonkwo's son. All three novels, taken together as Achebe's 'African Trilogy', create a full and beautifully nuanced arc, a human chronicle of the cultural and political changes that brought about what is now seen as the modern African state. After William Heinemann overcame their reservations and published Things Fall Apart in June 1958, it became a critical success. Achebe, the Times Literary Supplement wrote, had 'genuinely succeeded in presenting tribal life from the inside.' A novelty indeed. Things Fall Apart was pioneering not in its subject but in its African point of view, as there were already many well-regarded books about Africans written by non-Africans; tribal life had already been endlessly portrayed from the outside. Achebe himself first read some of the better-known examples of these 'colonialism classics' as a secondary-school student in the 1940s. 'I did not see myself as an African to begin with,' he has written about his response to the African characters. 'I took sides with the white men against the savages. The white man was good and reasonable and intelligent and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid or, at the most, cunning. I hated their guts.' As Achebe matured and became more critical in his reading, he began to understand the enormous power that stories had, and how much this power was shaped by who told the stories and by how they were told. As a university student in the 1950s, in addition to reading Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Coleridge, Achebe also read Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson, a novel set in Nigeria, which Time magazine had named the 'best book ever written about Africa.' Achebe disagreed. Not only was the Nigerian character in the novel unrecognizable to him and his classmates but he also detected, in the description of Nigerians, 'an undertow of uncharitableness . . . a contagion of distaste, hatred and mockery.' There has been much written about Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart as a response to Mister Johnson, and one likes to think that Achebe would have written his novel even if he had not read Cary's. Still, the prejudiced representation of African characters in literatur Excerpted from The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
