African Literature: Everything Falls Apart, by Chinua Achebe

Many of you already know what I like about African literature, a genre that in recent years has begun to raise the voices and thoughts of a generation of artists with a lot to say about globalization, inequality and the contrasts of a single continent. And possibly it is Everything falls apart, the masterpiece of Nigerian Chinua Achebe, who wrote this book in 1958 inspired by his childhood place, Ogidi, one of the pillars of an increasingly necessary trend.

The protagonist of Everything falls apart is the warrior Okonkwo, the most glorious of the nine villages and one of the most respected men in Umuofia, a fictional place south of the Niger River, the cradle of Igbo culture. However, after killing a man by accident, the warrior will be forced to leave the village with his women and children to settle on the lands of his maternal uncle, the town of Mbanta, to which rumors of the appearance reach. of the white man and a new religion that has begun to attract members of the clan. Upon returning to Umuofia, Okonkwo will realize the change that his ethnic group has undergone and the possession of everything he knew by English priests and soldiers.

Everything falls apart is told like a story. One of concise and short sentences wrapped by elements of the Igbo culture such as its gods, ghosts or stories that mothers tell their children under the bishops that are scattered in this land of capricious crops and ancestral customs. A book that tries to introduce us to all those customs of Nigerian culture to advance in a way in growing, like a forest that begins to smell like fire, in which our intuition makes us premeditate the tragedy that begins to be glimpsed in the second of the three parts into which the story is divided.

Perfect exponent of the culture it represents, the Igbo, the Debolsillo edition of Todo se dismorona offers a glossary of native words reserved on the last page of the issue, which helps to better understand that latent microcosm somewhere in Nigeria where its author, Chinua Achebe, was born in 1930 to become a witness to the Anglo-Christian evangelization to which many of the populations located in the vicinity of the Niger River succumbed. . And it is that the arrival of the white man to the most magical continent in the world is the skeleton of a book that continues to be one of the fundamental pillars of African literature.

History offers us a vision totally alien to ours, coming from a proud and peaceful culture, absorbed in magical rites and traditions that will be challenged by the arrival of white men who divide the beliefs of the tribe and spread fear. about a people that ends up becoming submissive to the yoke of a western man whose activity in African countries (among many others) continues to be the subject of many articles, novels and essays.

Everything falls apart It will appeal to those who like to immerse themselves in other cultures and perspectives, who love those stories well told and, above all, simple but powerful.