Fire and Transition in Things Fall Apart

Abstract Although Chinua Achebe’s fundamental theme as a beginning novelist was the neo-Negritude assertion of dignity in the African past,’ which was of course legitimate as a matter of historical necessity, the focus of drama in his first novel may, rather, be said to be a society’s response to the complex challenge of contact with a colonizing cultural force. For the impressively proud African past which he depicts in Things Fall Apart shows a people caught in the initial throes of contact with an imperial force which is self-righteously bent upon a “civilizing” mission. The impact of that force on the host culture, especially on the minds and lives of the indigenous Africans, is the plane of action on which the story unfolds its tragic drama. Culture, like life itself, is a dynamic or continuing process, and its quality often depends upon a people’s responses to evolutionary pressures from within or to stresses generated from outside through friction with new sets of values and institutional structures. Transition and change, and seldom stasis, usually result from such meetings between different cultures and peoples.