SOURCE: “Chinua Achebe Writing Culture: Representations of Gender and Tradition in Things Fall Apart,” in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 30, No. 2, Summer, 1999, pp. 148–64.

In the following essay, Osei-Nyame analyzes the complexity of the relationships and the varying forms of consciousness within the Igbo community as portrayed by Achebe in Things Fall Apart.

Wherever something stands, there something else will stand.

—Igbo saying

While Achebe's early novels have been popularly received for their representation of an early African nationalist tradition that repudiates imperialist and colonialist ideology, his counter-narratives have only been narrowly discussed for their theoretical speculation on cultural and ideological production as a mode of resistance within the nationalist tradition that the texts so evidently celebrate. My epigraph not only recognizes that the definition of “tradition” in Achebe's work hinges upon ideological conflict, it comments also on the varying forms of consciousness that arise within discourses of self-definition...