The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats  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.  Surely some revelation is at hand;  Surely the Second Coming is at hand.  The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out  When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi  Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert  A shape with lion body and the head of a man,  A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,  Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it  Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.  The darkness drops again; but now I know  That twenty centuries of stony sleep  Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,  Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Achebe titled his most famous novel Things Fall Apart (1958), prefacing the book with the poem's first four lines. Achebe's novel adheres to Yeats' theme by illustrating the sudden collapse of African societies in the age of European colonialism.Things Fall Apart

What is colonialism? Definition: practice of ruling nations as colonies: a policy in which a country rules other nations and develops trade for its own benefit

Before the European invasion of Africa there were over 800 distinct languages and many diverse cultures. The European invasion forever changed the development of Africa.

Achebe uses this opening stanza of William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” from which the title of the novel is taken, as an epigraph to the novel. In invoking these lines, Achebe hints at the chaos that arises when a system collapses. That “the center cannot hold” is an ironic reference to both the imminent collapse of the African tribal system, threatened by the rise of imperialist bureaucracies, and the imminent disintegration of the British Empire. Achebe, writing in 1959, had the benefit of retrospection in depicting Nigerian society and British colonialism in the 1890s.

Yet Achebe’s allusion is not simply political, nor is it ironic on only one level. Yeats’s poem is about the Second Coming, a return and revelation of sorts. In Things Fall Apart, this revelation refers to the advent of the Christian missionaries (and the alleged revelation of their teachings), further satirizing their supposed benevolence in converting the Igbo. For an agricultural society accustomed to a series of cycles, including that of the locusts, the notion of return would be quite credible and familiar.

The hyperbolic and even contradictory nature of the passage’s language suggests the inability of humankind to thwart this collapse. “Mere anarchy” is an oxymoron in a sense, since the definition of anarchy implies an undeniably potent level of radicalism. The abstraction in the language makes the poem’s ideas universal: by referring to “[t]hings” falling apart as opposed to specifying what those collapsing or disintegrating things are.

The hip hop group The Roots titled their 1999 album Things Fall Apart taking the name from Achebe’s novel. Things Fall Apart Why do you think they would be interested in titling their album after Achebe’s book?

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart Born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe The son of Isaiah Okafo, a Christian churchman, and Janet N. Achebe November 16, 1930 in Ogidi, Nigeria. He married Christie Chinwe Okoli, September 10, 1961, and now has four children: Chinelo, Ikechukwu, Chidi, and Nwando. He attended Government College in Umuahia from 1944 to 1947 University College in Ibadan from 1948 to He then received a B.A. from London University in 1953 and studied broadcasting at the British Broadcasting Corp. in London in 1956.

Things Fall Apart focuses on Nigeria's early experience with colonialism, from first contact with the British to widespread British administration. "Chinua Achebe creates in his novel a coherent picture of coherence being lost, of the tragic consequences of the African-European collision," - Robert McDowell

Look for Nigeria

Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, is the seminal African novel in English. Its most striking feature is to create a complex and sympathetic portrait of a traditional village culture in Africa.

Achebe is trying not only to inform the outside world about Ibo cultural traditions, but to remind his own people of their past and to assert that it had contained much of value. All too many Africans in his time were ready to accept the European judgment that Africa had no history or culture worth considering.

He also fiercely resents the stereotype of Africa as an undifferentiated "primitive" land, the "heart of darkness," as Conrad calls it. Throughout the novel he shows how African cultures vary among themselves and how they change over time. Look for instances of these variations as you read.

Themes Change vs. Progress Impact of Colonialism Moral Ambiguity Masculinity Tragic Flaw

The religious beliefs of the Ibo people are very different than Christians beliefs. In summary the Ibo people believe:  The supreme God or deity (Chukwa) who is most powerful and controls fertility and creation. He is represented by many other minor gods and sacrifices are made through them.  Personal Gods (Chi) which are believed to be in control of a person’s destiny.  Ancestors, these are often represented by masked men (egwugwu) at social gatherings and are greatly respected and worshipped. There is constant interaction between the worlds of the living and the dead.

This is a powerful indictment of the evils of imperialism. It reflects the brutal oppression in the Belgian Congo. At the end of the story Conrad tells us of a man named Kurtz, dying, insane, and guilty of atrocity and genocide. King Leopold II of Belgium organized in 1878, a private commercial company, under the name of the International Africa (Congo) Association. He was the president and the chief stockholder. The purpose was the purchase of Congo land for the exploitation of rubber resources. The king then secured international sanction, at the Berlin conference ( ) for transforming the Company’s lands into the Congo Free State, with himself as its personal sovereign. He earned great profits in this undertaking. By 1908, the government of Belgium took over the Congo Free State as a Belgian colony, on payment of liberal financial compensation to Leopold II.