Things Fall Apart

The new economic features that white men bring with them (a trading store, a market for palm-oil and kernel) appeal to men like Okonkwo. These positive features, led by a missionary named Mr. Brown, soften the attitudes of many villagers toward the Christians. Mr. Brown preaches to “his energetic flock” against “excess of zeal” in their faith, and because “he treads softly on his faith,” he is “respected even by the clan” (178).

He debates religion with Akunna, “one of the great men” in a neighboring village who “[gives] one of his sons to be taught the white man’s knowledge in Mr. Brown’s school” (179). Through Akunna, Mr. Brown learns about the clan’s religion and comes to understand that “a frontal attack on it would not succeed” (181).

Mr. Brown’s school and hospital are his chosen tools to get villagers involved in his project. Learning to read and write, he explains, will prevent “strangers” from “[coming] from other places to rule them” (181). More and more people come to learn, and “people [begin] to say that the white man’s medicine [is] quick in working” (181). “From the very beginning,” then, “religion and education [go] hand in hand,” as those who stay in the school gain positions and new churches grow in those new places (182).

Eventually, Mr. Brown’s health breaks down, and “he [has] to leave his flock, sad and broken” (182). Before he leaves, Mr. Brown visits Okonkwo to inform him that Nwoye now attends a teacher’s college. He hopes that Okonkwo will “be happy to hear of it,” but Okonkwo rejects him and drives him away (182).

Ultimately, Okonkwo is dissatisfied with his return, which few notice. The clan is “barely recognizable” (182). It is the wrong year to initiate his sons into the ozo society, which would bring the family honor but which initiates only every three years. Okonkwo grieves not only for himself but also “for the clan, which he [sees] breaking up and falling apart,” and “for the warlike men of Umuofia, who had so unaccountably become soft like women” (183).

The missionary who replaces Mr. Brown, Reverend James Smith, “[sees] things as black and white,” with black as ‘evil’” (184). He sees the world, and the village, as “a battlefield,” and he decries his followers’ “ignorance” about the traditions of the church (184). He vows to “whip” the “idolatrous crowd” out of the church, leaving only the purely pious (184).

Reverend Smith raises the “over-zealous converts” Mr. Brown had restrained, especially Enoch, the man accused of killing and eating a sacred python (185). Empowered and energetic, Enoch “[unmasks] an egwugwu in public” during the worship of the earth goddess, committing “one of the greatest crimes a man could commit” (186).

“That night the Mother of the Spirits [walks] the length and breadth of the clan, weeping” for the murdered ancestral spirit (187). Her weeping is “a strange and fearful sound,” the sound of “the very soul of the tribe [weeping] for a great evil that [is] coming—its own death” (187). Even Mr. Smith hears the sound, and for “the first time he [seems] to be afraid” (187).

The egwugwu from each part of the clan and nearby villages assemble the next day in a “terrible gathering” that “[sends] tremors of fear into every heart” (187). Enoch hides in the parsonage, though he personally hopes for a “holy war” (188). The egwugwu set fire to his compound and then head to the church to find him.

Instead, the egwugwu find Mr. Smith, who walks toward them as the air fills with “discordant bells,” clashing machetes, “dust and weird sounds” (188). Accompanied by his interpreter, Okeke, Mr. Smith keeps “unexpected composure” that checks “the onrush of the egwugwu” (189). But the band surges on and surrounds Mr. Smith and Okeke until Ajofia, the leading egwugwu, silences the crowd.

Okeke is a native of Umuru, a faraway village, and does not know how to respond when Ajofia speaks to him in the voice of an ancestor speaking to a human. He tells the white man that they “will not do him any harm” as long as he will “leave [them] alone” (190). For the sake of Mr. Brown, who they liked, the egwugwu will spare his brother, but they will destroy “this shrine which he built” (190). Ajofia encourages him to return home to “worship the gods and the spirits of his fathers” (190).

But Mr. Smith righteously stands his ground. Okeke “wisely” interprets a different message: Mr. Smith is “happy” that they bring their “grievances, like friends” and “will be happy” if they “leave the matter in his hands” (191). This message does not pacify the egwugwu, who burn the church until it is “a pile of earth and ashes” (191).