Things Fall Apart cover

Things Fall Apart

by Chinua Achebe

The African civilization story colonizers didn't write.

For you if

you were taught that colonialism brought civilization to Africa and are ready to find out what was already there

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Okonkwo is a great man in the Igbo village of Umuofia — wrestler, farmer, warrior, father — living inside a complex, functioning civilization. Then the British arrive. Achebe wrote this in 1958 because he was tired of African novels that showed Africans through European eyes. He wanted to write the story from inside, in a prose that carried the rhythms of Igbo storytelling. The book that changed African literature and still hasn't been surpassed as the definitive dispatch from inside precolonial Africa meeting its end.

Where This Book Lives

Setting
Nigeria • West Africa
Voice
Written by a Nigerian author

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dir. Biyi Bandele

Twin sisters, one war, two impossible choices.

Twin sisters from a wealthy Nigerian family take very different paths in newly independent 1960s Nigeria, until the outbreak of the Biafran War forces politics into every corner of their private lives. Adapted from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel.

Why it’s here: Punk in refusing to let romance and betrayal upstage the Biafran genocide it's actually about — political catastrophe and private life collapse into each other. Pedagogical in showing how independence's promise curdled into ethnic war within a single generation.

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