Lesson 1: One class period
Lesson 2: One class period
Lesson 3: Two class periods
Skills
Close reading and analysis of texts
Comparing and contrasting
Drawing conclusions
Note-taking
Research, analysis, and synthesis of ideas
Wring analytic and expository essays
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart: Teaching Through the Novel
"The
last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body
of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid
terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade
and slavery. … This continued until the Africans themselves, in the middle of
the twentieth century, took into their own hands the telling of their story."
(Chinua Achebe, "An
African Voice")
Introduction
Chinua Achebe is
one of Africa's most well-known and influential contemporary writers. His first
novel, Things Fall Apart, is an early narrative about the European colonization
of Africa told from the point of view of the colonized people. Published in 1958,
the novel recounts the life of the warrior and village hero Okonkwo, and describes
the arrival of white missionaries to his Igbo village and their impact on African
life and society at the end of the nineteenth century. Through his writing, Achebe
counters images of African societies and peoples as they are represented within
the Western literary tradition and reclaims his own and his people's history.
How does Achebe see the role of the writer/storyteller? In what ways does he use
fiction as a means of expressing and commenting on history? To what extent is
Things Fall Apart successful in communicating an alternative narrative to the
dominant Western history of missionaries in Africa and other colonized societies?
Learning
Objectives
After completing the lessons in this unit, students will:
Become
familiar with some African literature and literary traditions
Become familiar
with elements of African and Nigerian culture
See how historical events
are represented in fiction
Be able to differentiate between historical
accounts and fictionalized accounts of history
Understand narrative perspective
as culturally-positioned (Afrocentric versus Eurocentric perspectives)
Preparing
to Teach This Lesson
To gain background knowledge on the history and culture
of the Igbo people and to help students understand Things Fall Apart within the
historical context of the novel's events and the time of its writing and publication,
you can refer to the following EDSITEment-reviewed resources:
For information
on Igbo traditions, Nigeria, and Africa, see the Igbo Information page from the People's
Resources and the Nigeria
Information page, which provides a map and general information, including
descriptions of the four main ethnic groups -- Yoruba, Igbo, Fulani, and Hausa,
both located on Art and Life in Africa
Online. Also on this site is a good general essay on "Issues
in African History", which includes information on the European "Scramble
for Africa" (1880-1910) and the partitioning of Africa among European nations
through the Berlin Act of 1885. See also the essay "The
Berlin Conference", available through the EDSITEment-reviewed resource
Internet Public Library.
Two interviews in which Achebe discusses the origins and purposes
of his writing are "Chinua
Achebe: The Art of Fiction CXXXVIV," interviewed by Jerome Brooks in The Paris
Review, Issue #133 (Winter 1994-5) and "An
African Voice" Interview in The Atlantic Online (August 2, 2000). You may
wish to assign students the interviews or excerpts to read online or in printed
copies.
Lesson 1 uses maps to introduce students to the African continent
and countries. Before teaching this lesson, view and/or download copies of the
following maps from the periods before, during, and after the colonial period:
Maps of Africa from 1688 and 1909, taken from the
Map Collections 1500-1999 on the EDSITEment-reviewed resource American
Memory Collection. To view these maps, you can conduct a Search by Keyword
for "africa map."
The Languages
of Africa map, available through the EDSITEment-reviewed resource African
Studies WWW, shows the many different languages spoken across Nigeria,
with individual dots representing the primary location of a living language.
In
Lesson 3, if you choose to assign Heart of Darkness to students to read and compare
with Things Fall Apart, background information about Joseph Conrad can be found
in the Biographical
Essay on the EDSITEment-reviewed resource Victorian
Web.
Lesson
1: Mapping the Changing Face of Africa through History: Pre-Colonial,
European Colonization, and Independent Nations
In his essay "Issues
in African History", located on the EDSITEment-reviewed resource Art
and Life in Africa Online, Professor James Giblin of the University of
Iowa Department of History writes about the European "Scramble for Africa" (1880-1910)
and the Berlin Act of 1885, which created a set of European-controlled nation-states
that arbitrarily combined into one country diverse African ethnic groups, on one
hand, and divided linguistic and ethnic communities, on the other:
"Africa's
integration into a European-dominated economy has shaped its history since the
1880s. During the last quarter of the 19th century, Europe became increasing interested
in exerting direct control over the Africa's raw materials and markets. European
heads of state laid down ground rules for the colonial conquest of Africa at the
Congress of Berlin in 1884-5. Over the next twenty years, all of Africa except
Ethiopia and Liberia was violently conquered, despite many instances of African
resistance. The British and French established the largest African empires, although
the Portuguese, Belgians and Germans claimed major colonial possessions as well."
You
might point out to the class that the cultural, religious, linguistic, and other
historical divisions among ethnic groups have continued to challenge and blur
the colonial borders of many African Nation-States, during colonization and especially
after Independence.
Things Fall Apart takes place during Europe's violent
partitioning of Africa at the end of the 19th century, and Achebe wrote and published
the novel towards the end of the colonial period, during a time of burgeoning
nationalism across Africa:
"African frustration was compounded by the inconsistency
between, on the one hand, universalistic Christian ideals (for Christianity spread
widely during the colonial period, as did Islam) and liberal political ideas which
colonialism introduced into Africa, and, on the other hand, the discrimination
and racism which marked colonialism everywhere. This discrepancy deepened during
the Second World War, when the British and French exhorted their African subjects
to provide military service and labor for a war effort which was intended, in
part, to uphold the principle of national self-determination. Post-war Africans
were well aware that they were being denied the very rights for which they and
their colonial masters had fought.
This deepening sense of frustration
and injustice set in motion the events which would lead to national independence
for most of Africa by the mid-1960s" ("Issues in African History").
To give
students an idea of contemporary African geography as well as of the cultural
and political changes that Africa has undergone as a continent over the past two
centuries, provide the class with maps of Africa before, during, and after colonization,
and assign the following activities:
Download and distribute to each student
a copy of the African
Continent Map.Gif located on the Multimedia
Archive, available through the EDSITEment-reviewed resource African
Studies WWW. This map indicates the outline of countries in Africa but
is blank inside. Have students identify as many African countries as possible,
filling in the names of the countries on the map. Ask them if they can identify
any languages spoken in specific countries, and have them write these down on
their maps as well. Write down the names of the countries that students were able
to identify. Which countries are they? Where did they get their information, from
school, their families or acquaintances, the news? Ask the class what they know
about the countries they were able to identify on the map and from which sources they
received their information.
Using a computer projection, individual
or small group computer stations, or printed out copies, use the maps of Africa
from 1688 and 1909, which you can find on the Map
Collections 1500-1999 at the EDSITEment-reviewed resource American
Memory Collection by conducting a Search by Keyword for "Africa."
For
both of these maps, you can select the desired zoom level and window size to increase
the detail of the displayed image and the size of the map, respectively. If you
click in the Zoom View window and then click on the image, the display will be
centered on the selected part of the map. You can select an area in the small
Navigator View map so that the red box on the Navigator View will indicate the
area of the image being viewed in the larger Zoom View.
Show the class the Map of Africa 1688 or 1707, before
colonization by Europe, and the Map of Africa 1909, which shows the continent
divided up among British, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Spanish Colonies,
the Belgian Congo, and Independent African States. Ask students to compare the
maps: What differences do they notice? What similarities?
A map of post-colonial
Africa showing the different countries, updated in 1998, is available on the Countries
Resources page of the EDSITEment-reviewed resource Art and Life in Africa
Online. A larger version of this map is available at Africa.gif, from CIA
Maps, located on the Multimedia
Archive, available through the EDSITEment-reviewed resource African
Studies WWW.
Have the class compare the contemporary map with the
two earlier maps and discuss the changes in the geo-political divisions of the
African continent. Then ask students to look over their original maps and fill
in the names of the countries that they missed in their first mapping activity.
You can note to students that African ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups
have resisted the geo-political boundaries of many Nation-States created under
colonization; for instance, the borders of West Africa set in place under colonialism
are often contrary to the area's cultural and political reality (See Robert Kaplan,
"The Coming Anarchy" Atlantic Monthly Feb. 1994
Rpt. Atlantic Online, available through the EDSITEment-reviewed resource Internet
Public Library.
To give students an overview of Nigerian history
and cultural geography, locate Nigeria on a map of Africa from the EDSITEment-reviewed
resource Art and
Life in Africa Online: Countries' Resources. Then present a map of Nigeria
itself on the Nigeria
Information page, and point out the Igbo area. This page provides a map
and general information about Nigeria, including descriptions of its four main
ethnic groups: Yoruba, Igbo, Fulani, and Hausa, and the Igbo
Information page from the Peoples
Resources section of the site offers information about the ethnic group
described in Things Fall Apart.
You can point out the vast ethnic (Yoruba,
Igbo, Hausa,Fulani among many other peoples), religious (Muslim 50%, Christian
40%, African religion 10%), and linguistic diversity ( 515 listed languages, 505
of which are living languages) of present-day Nigeria using the Languages
of Nigeria and Languages
of Nigeria Map pages available through the EDSITEment-reviewed resource
African Studies WWW. The Languages
of Africa map provides a graphic depiction the many different languages
spoken across Nigeria, with individual dots representing the primary location
of a living language.
In an August 2002 interview "An
African Voice", published in The Atlantic Online, available through the
EDSITEment-reviewed resource Internet Public Library, Achebe explains the fundamental and far-reaching disruption of African societies
and social orders through European colonization:
"The society
of Umuofia, the village in Things Fall Apart, was totally disrupted by the coming
of the European government, missionary Christianity, and so on. That was not a
temporary disturbance; it was a once and for all alteration of their society.
To give you the example of Nigeria, where the novel is set, the Igbo people had
organized themselves in small units, in small towns and villages, each self-governed.
With the coming of the British, Igbo land as a whole was incorporated into a totally
different polity, to be called Nigeria, with a whole lot of other people with
whom the Igbo people had not had direct contact before. The result of that was
not something from which you could recover, really. You had to learn a totally
new reality, and accommodate yourself to the demands of this new reality, which
is the state called Nigeria. Various nationalities, each of which had its own
independent life, were forced by the British to live with people of different
customs and habits and priorities and religions. And then at independence, fifty
years later, they were suddenly on their own again. They began all over again
to learn the rules of independence. The problems that Nigeria is having today
could be seen as resulting from this effort that was initiated by colonial rule
to create a new nation."
Ask students to note places in the
text that foreshadow this disruption, this replacement of one reality with another,
as they read the novel. For example, Achebe's first reference to the character
Ikemefuna as "ill-fated," at the end of Chapter 1, foreshadows the boy's death
and Okonkwo's son Nwoye's troubled response in Chapter 7, which in turn foreshadows
Nwoye's conversion to Christianity and joining the missionaries in Chapter 16.
In Chapters 16 through 18, Achebe indicates the ways in which the Europeans separated
Nigerians of different clans and ethnic backgrounds and turned them against their
own people and villages through their appeal to the village outcasts and by "teaching
young Christians to read and write." Another example of how Achebe foreshadows
the alteration of indigenous society is the replacement by "the white man's court"
of the clan's customs with their own laws, discussed in Chapter 20. Obierika explains:
"He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart."
Lesson
2: Telling One's Own Story: Differing Perspectives
One
theme that appears over and over in Achebe's writing is that our perceptions and
the stories we tell are shaped by our social and cultural context, and he emphasizes
that, "those that have been written about should also participate in the making
of these stories" ("An
African Voice").
Achebe writes his own history of colonization in
order to present a perspective different from those taught in the Western literary
and historical tradtions. However, the text of Things Fall Apart provides a range
of perspectives through its narrator and many characters. To create a framework
for interpreting the conflict within and between values and cultures that Achebe
addresses, engage students in a discussion of perspective/standpoint, and provide
them an opportunity to analyze and then take on the perspective of one of the
characters in the novel.
Ask the class, "Who is the narrator/speaker in
the novel? Do the narrator's position, perspective, and identity remain constant
or change throughout the narrative? What other characters' views are represented
and used to convey the novel's insights and to give readers a certain viewpoint
on Igbo society and the class with the British missionaries?"
Ask students
to take up a character in the novel, such as Okonkwo, Obierika, Unoka, Ekwefi,
Ezinma, Nwoye, or Ikemefuna, and rewrite a scene from his or her voice and position.
To help students approach this activity, ask them why they chose a certain character,
what role the character plays in the novel, and which scene would be appropriate
to rewrite from this character's perspective. (The confrontations between the
white men and the Igbo people are good incidents to use for the rewrite, as they
can reinforce the colonialist/native point of view issue of the lesson.)
Use
the character's actions, observations about the character made by other characters
or by the character him- or herself within the text, narrative description, and
your own impressions to describe the character and infer a point of view. To aid
them in recognizing and adopting the point of view of one of the characters, have
students fill out the Character Traits Chart, available in pdf format.
Lesson 3:
Revising History Through Writing
In an interview in the 1994-95 issue of
The Paris Review, Chinua Achebe states that he became a writer in order to tell
his story and the story of his people from his own viewpoint. He explains the
danger of having one's story told only by others through the following proverb:
"until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always
glorify the hunter." Critics and Achebe's own essays have portrayed Things Fall
Apart as a response to the ideologies and discursive strategies of colonial texts
such as Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
While
reading Things Fall Apart, students should reflect on the proverb and ask themselves
in what ways Achebe's novel subverts the themes and techniques of colonial writing
and constitutes a different story or counter-narrative to the European texts.
Ask the class to note the ways in which Achebe represents African culture and
the African landscape, and to give textual examples of ways in which he employs
narrative techniques that contest colonialist discourse. (Some examples are Achebe's
use of simple, ordinary prose and a restrained mode of narration; the omission
of exotic descriptions; creation of a subjectivity for his major characters; inclusion
of a specific cultural and temporal context of the Igbo and Umuofia; presentation
of the complexities and the contradictions of a traditional Igbo community without
idealizing; introduction of white Europeans into the story from the Igbo population's
perspective.)
In order to introduce students to colonial writing and thought,
assign one or both of the following texts for them to read and analyze in relation
to Things Fall Apart:
What is the moral dilemma presented within each work?
How do the two texts represent Christianity versus African religious belief
and practice?
How do they approach the relationship between the community
and the individual?
As an alternate to Heart of Darkness, Rudyard
Kipling's poem, "The
White Man's Burden", (Click 'Some Poems' then 'The White Man's Burden.') located on The
Kipling Organization, available through the EDSITEment-reviewed resource
The Academy of American Poets,
constitutes a brief but significant example of colonial literature. Note that
Kipling is writing about India rather than African countries, but that both situations
are examples of nineteenth-century British Empire and colonial relations.
Ask
students the following questions about the poem in comparison to Things Fall Apart:
What is "the white man's burden" within the poem? How does the poem portray non-white
peoples? What is the narrator's attitude towards Empire and colonialism? How does
this attitude compare with that of the narrator in Things Fall Apart? How are
the Europeans' views of Africans and the Africans' views of whites represented
in the novel? How is Things Fall Apart a response to and a revision of the view
of non-white people as represented in "The White Man's Burden"?
Debate the aims and outcomes of writing
in African languages versus colonizers' languages.
To extend the notion
of rewriting history from previously excluded points of view, have students analyze
the way Achebe represents women in Igbo society within Things Fall Apart, and
ask them to and write a paper discussing women's roles and status in the novel.
An interesting comparison to the women in Things Fall Apart read the essay by
John N. Oriji, "Igbo Women from 1929-1960" in West
Africa Review1 (2000), and write a paper comparing the role of women
in the novel and the historical role that Igbo women played in the Aba Women's
Revolt in Nigeria during colonialism.
Have students complete an at-home
project or an in-class essay on The Role of the Writer in Society. In addition
to publishing many novels chronicling the history of colonial and post-colonial
Nigeria through the lives of fictional protagonists and their communities, Chinua
Achebe has spoken out and written several essays on the role of the writer/storyteller
within his or her society. Write on the board or distribute to the class the following
quotes that Achebe uses to describe his mission as a writer:
"Here is
an adequate revolution for me to espouse -- to help my society regain belief in
itself and to put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement.
And it is essentially a question of education, in the best sense of that word.
Here, I think, my aims and the deepest aspirations of society meet" (Quoted by
George P. Landow in "Achebe's Fiction and Contemporary
Nigerian Politics", available through the EDSITEment-reviewed resource Internet
Public Library).
"The writer's duty is to help
them regain it [dignity] by showing them in human terms what happened to them,
what they lost. There is a saying in Ibo that a man who can't tell where the rain
began to beat him cannot know where he dried his body. The writer can tell the
people where the rain began to beat them. After all the novelist's duty is not
to beat this morning's headline in topicality, it is to explore in depth the human
condition. In Africa he cannot perform this task unless he has a proper sense
of history" ("The Role of the Writer in a New Nation").
Have
the class discuss what these statements say about Achebe's view of the role of
the writer/storyteller in society. As a final project, ask students to write an
essay that analyzes the ways in which Achebe fulfills his role as a writer according
to his definition through Things Fall Apart. For additional information, see the
essays "Africa and Her Writers" and "The Novelist as Teacher" in Chinua Achebe's
Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1975.
Achebe, Chinua, "The African Writer and the English
Language." In Achebe, Chinua, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. New York: Doubleday,
1975. 91-103.
-----, Things Fall Apart. New York: Ballantine Books, 1959.
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