Things Fall Apart — Complete Revision Guide

The novel is divided into three parts. Part One (chapters 1–13) is the longest and establishes Igbo life in Umuofia in painstaking detail. Parts Two and Three are progressively shorter, mirroring how quickly the colonial encounter dismantles a culture the novel has spent so long presenting on its own terms.

Part One — Umuofia (chapters 1–13)

• Chapter 1. Okonkwo is introduced as a famous wrestler and warrior whose fame “rested on solid personal achievements”. His father Unoka was a debt-ridden flute-player whom the clan called agbala (the same word means “woman”).
• Chapter 2. Umuofia receives word that a daughter of the clan has been murdered in the neighbouring village of Mbaino. As compensation, Mbaino sends a young virgin and a fifteen-year-old boy, Ikemefuna, who is placed in Okonkwo’s household.
• Chapters 3–4. Flashback to Okonkwo borrowing yam seeds from Nwakibie as a young man, surviving a disastrous farming year, and building his wealth despite his father’s ruin. His impatience and quick temper are flagged early.
• Chapter 5. The Feast of the New Yam. Okonkwo, restless without work, beats his second wife Ekwefi and shoots at her during the festival.
• Chapter 6. The wrestling match. Okonkwo’s nephew Maduka wins; a public spectacle of the values Okonkwo prizes.
• Chapter 7. Ikemefuna has lived with Okonkwo’s family for three years; Nwoye looks up to him “like an elder brother”. The Oracle of the Hills and the Caves declares that Ikemefuna must be killed. The elder Ezeudu warns Okonkwo to take no part. Okonkwo accompanies the men, and when the boy runs to him crying “My father, they have killed me!” Okonkwo — afraid of being thought weak — cuts him down with his machete.
• Chapter 8. Okonkwo cannot eat for two days. Obierika rebukes him: the killing was a thing the Earth would not approve.
• Chapters 9–11. Ezinma, Ekwefi’s only surviving child, falls ill. The priestess Chielo carries her through the night to the cave of Agbala. Ekwefi follows in terror; Okonkwo joins her. The scene is one of the novel’s most lyrical.
• Chapter 12. The uri (bride-price ceremony) of Obierika’s daughter Akueke. A picture of communal celebration that is also a record of how Igbo justice and family work.
• Chapter 13. The funeral of Ezeudu. Okonkwo’s gun explodes and accidentally kills Ezeudu’s sixteen-year-old son. The killing of a clansman is a “female” crime (inadvertent), so Okonkwo and his family are exiled for seven years to his motherland, Mbanta. His compound is burnt the morning after.

Part Two — Mbanta and the missionaries (chapters 14–19)

• Chapter 14. Okonkwo’s mother’s kinsman Uchendu receives him kindly but reminds him: “Mother is Supreme” — a man flees to his motherland in sorrow.
• Chapter 15. Obierika visits and reports the destruction of Abame: a white man rode in on an “iron horse” (bicycle), the village killed him, and three other white men later returned with soldiers and wiped out the market.
• Chapter 16. Two years later, Obierika returns and reports that Christian missionaries have come to Umuofia. Nwoye is among the converts.
• Chapter 17. The missionaries in Mbanta ask for land and are mockingly granted the Evil Forest, where the abandoned twins are left to die. When the church does not fall, the village is unsettled. Nwoye, drawn to the missionaries’ questions about the killing of Ikemefuna and the abandonment of twins, leaves his father.
• Chapter 18. The church admits osu(caste-outcasts), splitting clan opinion. A convert kills a sacred python; village punishment is imposed but the convert dies of illness first, which the village reads as the gods striking him.
• Chapter 19. Okonkwo’s exile ends. He thanks his mother’s kinsmen with a great feast before returning to Umuofia.

Part Three — Return and collapse (chapters 20–25)

• Chapter 20. Okonkwo returns to a transformed Umuofia. The white government has built a court at Umuofia and a District Commissioner tries cases “in ignorance” of Igbo custom. Obierika’s lament: “he has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart”.
• Chapter 21. Mr Brown, the first missionary, befriends the elder Akunna and listens. Theological exchanges of comparable seriousness. He builds a school and a small hospital.
• Chapter 22. Mr Brown leaves on health grounds and is replaced by Reverend James Smith, who sees no compromise. Enoch, an over-zealous convert, unmasks an egwugwu (a masked ancestral spirit) at a public festival — in Igbo terms, “killing” the ancestor. The egwugwu burn the church.
• Chapter 23. The District Commissioner invites the Umuofia leaders to a meeting, then has them seized, beaten, and held to ransom. Okonkwo is among them. Their heads are shaved and they are fined two hundred bags of cowries.
• Chapter 24. The clan gathers to decide on war. A court messenger arrives to disperse the meeting. Okonkwo beheads him with a machete. The crowd lets the other messengers go. Okonkwo realises in that moment that Umuofia will not fight.
• Chapter 25. The District Commissioner arrives at Okonkwo’s compound to arrest him. Obierika leads them to the back, where Okonkwo’s body hangs from a tree. Suicide is, in Igbo custom, an offence against the Earth; clansmen cannot touch the body. The Commissioner reflects that the story might make “a reasonable paragraph” in his planned book, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

The closing image — Okonkwo’s long-resisted death reduced to a footnote in someone else’s book — is the novel’s central irony. Achebe is rebuking exactly the colonial historiography this fictional Commissioner intends to write.