Chinua Achebe portrayed the destruction of his native Igbo tribal system and culture by the colonial rule of the Europeans in a strikingly realistic way through his well-known novels—Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God and No Longer at Ease—that are usually treated as a trilogy. But it is his first novel Things Fall Apart—written when he was 28 years old and published in English in 1958, which till date has sold more than ten million copies and has been translated into more than fifty languages—that earned him a permanent place in the literary world.

The novel, Things Fall Apart—his magnum opus—is all about the life of an African farmer, Okonkwo—an Igbo elder having “a manly and a proud heart”—and his fight against the assault of the colonizers from Britain to preserve his native customs in Igbo land, a province in the eastern region of present-day Nigeria. The novel plots the rise, fall and destruction of Okonkwo, who like Homer’s Achilles, is a “man of action, a man of war” and his fame squarely rests “on solid personal achievements” of being an accomplished warrior of the nine villages.

English Studies Journal, Chinua Achebe, Light of Conrad’s Dark Africa, Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God.