My Take: “Things Fall Apart”, Chinua Achebe’s first novel, is a seminal work in the modern literary cannon. Released in 1958, it was one of the works of literature written from the African perspective that was widely read in the West. This, combined with Achebe’s outspoken stance on the representation of Africa in the Western cannon, gives “Things Fall Apart” a significance beyond its (not insubstantial) literary merit. In short, there are cultural, literary and historical dividends from reading this book.

Achebe took the title of “Things Fall Apart” from a Keats poem about the collapse of European societies in the aftermath of World War I titled “The Second Coming”:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

It’s disturbing prose and an ideal allegory for the book’s overarching theme– the wholesale upheaval in the normal order of things in African society brought on by the arrival of European colonisers. Achebe explores his theme through the eyes of Okonwo, an esteemed patriarch in a small tribe in pre-colonial Africa. Okonwo is born of humble origins but rises to a position of high status in his village through many years of hard work and personal, emotional sacrifice. Okonwo is someone who has invested much to progress according to the norms of pre-colonial African society.  Inevitably, the violent change in social norms and the loss of equilibrium brought on by the arrival of European settlers hits Okonwo more than most.

Achebe paints a convincing portrait of how the arrival of Europeans broke down the bonds and structures that held pre-colonial African society together. Interestingly, he dedicates particular attention to examining the impact of European missionaries and the spread of Christianity on tribal society. The animistic religions of tribal Africa were the foundation stone of societal organisation. As these religions were the primary source of power in these societies, the spread of Christianity and its active hostility to these beliefs, did not just cause a spiritual upheaval, but also resulted in a wholesale destabilisation of society.

“Things Fall Apart” is interesting in a cultural sense as Achebe consciously wrote the book in an effort to counter the negative stereotypes of African society perpetuated by turn of the century European authors like Joseph Conrad. However, the book really doesn’t have the feel of a public service announcement. Okonwo is far from a likeable hero – in fact in a lot of respects he really is a stupid and nasty piece of work. However, Achebe skilfully reveals the human drivers for his stupidity and nastiness. Okonwo isn’t nice – but he’s significant from a literary perspective for the mere fact that the story is told from his perspective as a complex human being influenced by the forces around him rather than as an outsiders view of a simple animalistic brute.

Highlight:

“The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”

My Take: Philip Gourevitch’s account of the collective insanity of late 20^th century Rwanda is a moving account.

Not simply because it tells a horrific story mainly from first hand accounts, but moreso because it is told unashamedly from a position of moral clarity. Gourevitch doesn’t equivocate in this book. He tells the stories he’s heard directly and with clear moral verdicts. His writing isn’t annoyingly hectoring or self-righteous, but it clearly places blame where it belongs (ie the Belgians, the French, the Hutus, the UN, the French, the Americans, the UNHCR, the French). No where is this approach more clear than in the title of the book, which comes from a letter written by several local pastors to their regional superior, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a Seventh-Day Adventist Pastor who was later convicted in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda with aiding their killing the following day.

In many ways Gourevitch’s approach reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s writing on the holocaust in this regard – more interested in humanity, and what the genocide said about it, than in providing an objective political history. He delves into some detail into Rwanda’s history and culture, but more for philosophical reflection on the absurdities of human nature than to factually enlighten the reader. One particularly interesting section of the book in this regard was its discussion on the absurdly vague distinction drawn within the country between Hutus and Tutsis.

The very nature of the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis is difficult to articulate. Ethanographers and historians agree that they cannot properly be called distinct ethnic groups. Similarly, the difference does not quite fit the description of classes, castes or ranks. What can be said is that the perceptions of difference probably sprung from historical occupational distinctions between Tutsi as herdsman and Hutu as cultivators. Allegedly, the increased value of cattle gave the numerically inferior Tutsis some social and political cache that was entrenched by entrenched in the 19th century when the Mwami Kigeri Rwabugiri, a Tutsi, ascended the throne, and expanded the state to around its present borders.

All of the above is difficult to verify as a result of the ambiguities of oral history and the substantial distrust that now overlays the area. However, what can be confidently said is that it was the Belgians that entrenched and perpetuated these distinctions in order to administer their colonial rule. As Gourevitch tellingly recounts:

“Colonisation is violence, and there are many ways to carry out that violence. In addition to military and administrative chiefs and a veritable army of churchmen, the Belgians dispatched scientists to Rwanda. The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and callipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they had believed all along.  Tutsis had a ‘nobler’, more ‘naturally’ aristocratic dimensions than the ‘coarse’ and ‘bestial’ Hutus. On the ‘nasal index’ for instance, the median Tutsi nose was found to be about two and a half millimetres longer and nearly five millimetres narrower than the median Hutu nose.”

….

“In 1933-34, the Belgians conducted a census in order to issue ‘ethnic’ identity cards, which labelled every Rwandan as either Hutu (85%) of Tutsi (14%) or Twa (1%). The identity cards made it virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis, and permitted the Belgians to perfect the administration of an apartheid system rooted in the myth of Tutsi superiority… Whatever Hutu and Tutsi identity may have stood for in the pre-colonial state no longer mattered; the Belgians had made ‘ethnicity’ the defining feature of Rwandan existence.”

Combine this institutionalised societal division with the brutality and repression of the Belgian colonial administration and the die was well and truly set. But again, Gourevitch does not recount this history to offer lessons, but more so to muse on the nature of humanity. It’s an approach that works in literature, if not in conflict studies. No doubt the causes of the genocide were more nuanced and ambiguous than Gourevitch recounts. No doubt it’s also important for subject matter scholars to study and analyse these reasons. But for the broader mass of humanity, the rights and wrongs of genocide are patently clear. Gourevitch’s moral clarity in the face of the victims he has encountered seems appropriate and his reflection on the nature of humanity seems the best thing that anyone from outside of Rwanda can take from the tragedy.

Highlight:

“Like Leontius, the young Athenian in Plato, I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps, in examining this extremity with me, you hope for some understanding, some insight, some flicker of self-knowledge – a moral, or a lesson, or a clue about how to behave in this world: some such information. I don’t discount the possibility, but when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up with for looking closely into Rwanda’s stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it. The horror, the horror, interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand its legacy.”

My Take: For quite a short novella, “The Heart of Darkness” has certainly prompted a lot of meta-discussion. The subject of critical attention as a part of the Western cannon, as a flash point in post-colonial literary debates, as a semi-autobiographical account of Conrad’s own travels in colonial Congo, and as an infamous adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola, “The Heart of Darkness” has been looked at from every imaginable angle in the last fifty years. However, as with most seminal books, the novel itself is worth a read if only so that you can make up your own mind distinct from the analysis.

Strangely enough, the “Heart of Darkness” is written in the format of a sea-story being recounted to an unnamed narrator (a framed narrative for the pedants). While the deck of a ship berthed in the River Thames at first seems to be a strange place to open a story about madness in colonial Africa, this device instils the book with the characteristic of a ghost story being told on a dark and stormy night – a perfectly fitting atmosphere for the novel.

Marlow, a steam-boat captain, tells the story of his travels in the Congo, and his search for the mysterious ivory trader Kurtz, with a ferocious emotional intensity. Marlow recounts the horrors he saw during his time in Africa – the instinctive violence of the Europeans towards the Africans and the savagery the local (‘cannibal’) inhabitants – with a pervasive philosophical reflection. Despite everything that Marlow faces during his search for Kurtz, the real conflict in “The Heart of Darkness” is internal. The most engaging passages of the book are Marlow’s internal struggles with what he confronts, to wit:

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there — there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were, — No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity — like yours — the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.

Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you — you so remote from the night of first ages — could comprehend.

And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything — because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage — who can tell? — but truth — truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder — the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff — with his own inborn strength. Principles? Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags — rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief.

Marlow struggles to rationalise what he has encountered in the Congo, particularly the circumstances in which he finds Kurtz, and the flashes of self-recognition he saw as he peered into the abyss. This ultimately is the central philosophical question in “The Heart of Darkness” – what is it that separates man from savagery? The infamous ‘Horror’ of “The Heart of Darkness” is the conclusion that both Kurtz and Marlow reach that savagery is the natural state of the human condition and that the artificial moral constraints of civilised society are an unnatural, and impermanent illusion. Kurtz ultimately put the issue directly to Marlow, asking him to take his ‘choice of nightmares’ and live in a natural state of savagery and barbarity or an unnatural and repressed state of superficial moral constraint.

Probably the bleakest conclusion to a novel in the Western Cannon – but not one to be missed. Check it out for yourself.

Highlight:

I think the knowledge came to him at last — only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude — and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating.

Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror — of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath — ‘The horror! The horror!’