Things Fall Apart: Is this the Verdict for Christianity in Africa?

Is it possible to be both truly African and truly Christian?

Asked why he wrote Things Fall Apart, in an interview on the 50^th anniversary of the novel, Chinua Achebe answered that he was responding to what he felt was a gap on the bookshelf. Having been acquainted with the classics of Western literature, he felt that some important, and perhaps great, stories remained untold.

Achebe made his motivation bare in an essay titled, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1977). In it he criticized the so-called Eurocentrism that he found in Joseph Conrad’s fiction about Africa, Heart of Darkness. For Achebe, "Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world’, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant beastiality [sic]".¹ Civilization belonged to Europe; elsewhere – Africa, for example - savagery reined. Achebe accuses Conrad of dehumanizing the African people, their culture and their religion. Heart of Darkness may be considered a classic, but it is a grave insult on the culture of a people who form part of the human race.

Things Fall Apart aimed to overcome the dominating Eurocentrist view, by telling an African story - from ‘within’. Before his work, successful fiction on Africa had been written by non-Africans, such as the Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad, who viewed the African reality in too condescending a manner and perhaps judged too harshly. Achebe’s debut novel, which was praised as “opening the magic casements of African fiction”, aimed to put forth a more complex story. Achebe felt his task to be that of retelling a story that had been dismissed, rushed over, or simply ignored. Things Fall Apart is considered the African classic novel, having sold over 20 million copies in 57 translations world over.

Things Fall Apart unveils the rich Igbo culture. But it is a critical unveiling. Achebe does not hide the weaknesses, the dark elements, of his people’s culture and religion. Nor does he shy away from letting the bright spots speak for themselves. The village of Umuofia enjoys political stability through various structures of tribal life such as the council of elders that adjudicated disputes timely and effectively. Scholars have admired Umuofia’s democratic air for example, when everyone assembles to discuss at the market square when existential crises beckon. Achebe does not cut out the male chauvinism, black magic, and inhuman rituals that formed part of the Igbo culture.

The novel is a tragedy by genre. The title, taken from W. B. Yeat’s poem Second Coming, foreshadows such an end. ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…’. Achebe wants to redeem, to rediscover to the world, the nuanced heritage of the Igbo - and he succeeds. But there is something of loss in his work. That beautiful heritage has in the end fallen apart - it has been destroyed irreparably. The cause of such a tragedy is clear enough for everyone to see. It is the white man and his religion.

The White man’s religion

Post-colonial African writers are wont to refer to Christianity as the “White man’s religion”. Indeed, it is white missionaries, who first brought the faith to African lands often with the complicity and support of colonial authorities. Used in the context of ‘decolonisation’, the term “White man’s religion” is revealing as important conclusions are drawn.

Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) has offered interesting reflections on a related issue. Ratzinger recalls in his memoirs, Milestones 1927-1977, how the Nazi regime attempted to revive the old German religion of the Maypole. The great Aryan race, the Nazis saw, could only be fully restored if it cast aside Christianity in order to embrace its ‘roots’. In other words, Christianity was considered a foreign religion. Needless to say, the Maypole god did not attract a goodly following. Ratzinger also notes that similar arguments (or are they cries?) are often heard elsewhere. In a 1993 lecture, Ratzinger remarked that, “doubts have arisen today about the universality of Christian faith. Many no longer see the history of worldwide mission as the history of the diffusion of liberating truth and love, but as a history of alienation and violation.”²

The Christian faith, specifically its absolute and universal claim, has come to be included into the critique of Eurocentrism. The white man’s religion is just that: an imposition by the white man. Are not all religions equal? What right has anyone to claim that his God is the true God, and that other gods are mere carven images? The “dictatorship of relativism” – to use a Ratzingerian phrase – has emboldened the critique of Christianity’s “arrogance”.

Culture and religion

The Igbo social fabric collapses, falls apart, at the hands the Christian mission and colonial conquest.

"As for me, I have only a short while to live, and so have Uchendu and Unachukwu and Emefo. But I fear for you young people because you do not understand how strong is the bond of kinship. You do not know what it is to speak with one voice. And what is the result? An abominable religion has settled among you. A man can now leave his father and his brothers. He can curse the gods of his fathers and his ancestors, like a hunter's dog that suddenly goes mad and turns on his master. I fear for you, I fear for the clan. "(Things Fall Apart, 50^th Anniversary Edition, page 70)

As far as the Igbo elders are concerned, it was not just the white man’s political oppression that was at issue. The Christian influence was felt to be the more insidious because of how it damaged the spiritual fabric, the very soul of the clan. This excerpt gets to the heart of the matter:

"Does the white man understand our custom about land?" "How can he when he does not even speak our tongue? But he says that our customs are bad, and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad. How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart." (Things Fall Apart, 50^th Anniversary Edition, page 73)

The brilliance of Achebe’s storytelling comes forth. His story confirms the finding of much scholarship on religion. “In all known historical cultures, religion is the essential element of culture, indeed it is its determining core,” Ratzinger notes.³ The historian Christopher Dawson has also argued, convincingly, of religion’s central role in the development of any culture and civilization.⁴

If this is the case, Ratzinger continues, “it is difficult to see how a culture, living and breathing the religion with which it is interwoven, can be transplanted into another religion without both of them going to ruin. If you remove from a culture its own religion which begets it, then you rob it of its heart. Should you implant in it a new heart, the Christian heart, it seems inescapable that the organism which is not ordered to it will reject the foreign body.”⁵ If this reasoning is correct, we can conclude that indeed Christianity is the destroyer of cultures and that “inculturation” is only a euphemism. Such a conclusion would seem to fly in the face of what is meant by Christian universalism. Then it would be true that the “century of Christian endeavour” in Africa has been a tale of isolation and alienation.

The meeting of cultures - “interculturality”

In the above quoted lecture (available here), Ratzinger proceeds to make the case for Christian universalism. The ground for its justification, he argues, has to be the universality of cultures. A universality that is possible because “the same human nature is at work”. “The operation [inculturation] can only have sense if Christian faith and the other religion, together with the culture which lives from it, do not stand in utter difference to each other. It only makes sense if they are interiorly open to one another, or to put it differently, if they naturally tend to draw near and unite.” Christian evangelisation of cultures is not an isolation, a destruction, only if cultures are ordered “to a common truth of the human condition”. So that, “no injustice is done to a culture when, due to the universal human disposition toward the truth, it is opened up and further developed by a new cultural power.” In other words, the light of Christ has come to enable cultures to come fully into their own; shedding their evils, embracing the true good of man, amplifying what good they already had. We might give Western civilization itself as an example. The Western ideal is characterised by some as the fruitful fusion of the best of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome and Judaeo-Christianity.⁶ Now, this Western ideal was accomplished chiefly because of Catholicism. From the chaos that the Roman empire had been reduced to, the Christian faith engendered what is no doubt one of the greatest civilizations that will be known to man.⁷ While one might not subscribe to it, one will give credit to Scholasticism as a formidable development of the Platonic-Aristotelian philosophical genius. And the gems of Roman law survive in Western law, enriched by Christian wisdom—such as the understanding of the person as having of infinite dignity.

For Ratzinger, this reasoning should lead us to speak of the ‘meeting of cultures’ or interculturality (a term he coins in the lecture) rather than inculturation. Not everyone will agree with Ratzinger’s verdict. His reasoning is based on certain fundamental presuppositions, both metaphysical⁸ and revelational/theological.⁹ While an elucidation and defence of these presuppositions would lie beyond the scope of the present article, this does not detract from the value of putting forward his argument for the sake of dialogue.

Have things fallen apart?

“Okonkwo was deeply grieved. And it was not just a personal grief. He mourned for the clan, which he saw breaking up and falling apart, and he mourned for the warlike men of Umuofia, who had so unaccountably become soft like women” (Things Fall Apart, 50^th Anniversary Edition, page 76). For Okonkwo, it had all fallen apart. The story’s protagonist comes to an end reminiscent of that of Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

If Okonkwo had resurrected to see the present day, would he think differently? Would he agree that “only appearing to die, the culture(s) actually rises, coming fully into its own for the first time” on account of Christian influence, as Ratzinger posits?

Simple conclusions will not do. Multiple cultural powers are at work. Besides Christianity, there is first-world secularism, which may be indeed the real destroyer of cultures. Islam has been present in Africa for at least as long as Christianity, with the few exceptions of Ethiopia and Northern Africa. Africa’s soul continues to be shaped. Thus we cannot simply answer the question whether things have fallen apart. But we can ask after the impact Christianity has had on African tribal life so far.

Christian missionaries did not endeavour to uproot African culture completely and indiscriminately. Rather they took care to only condemn what had to be condemned. They let those customs that respect human dignity live on. This is not to say that excesses and defects were absent. But if a wholesale discrediting of African culture was the mission, it is hard to see how Africans would have embraced the new religion. The first motivation for spreading the Gospel message goes back to early Christianity; it was the “certainty of having received the saving knowledge and redeeming love which all men had a claim to and were yearning for in the inmost recesses of their beings”.¹⁰

Post-modernist thinking will say that the real motivation was the drive for power. Indeed, all endeavour is driven by a desire to impose upon and so oppress. There is a truth in the post-modernist critique. The Eurocentrist critique is legitimate. The error is to apply that single truth to the whole reality absolutely so that one commits a reductionism.

Today we see an Africa that has embraced Christianity as something of its own. For most African Christians it simply never occurs to them to think that Christianity is just the “white man’s religion”.  It is African intellectuals of the post-modernist mould who still speak of the “white man’s religion” (and, of course, hard-line African traditionalists). As some had prophesied, the days have come in which Africa evangelises the secular West. For example, the shortage of Catholic clergy in the United States is regularly eased by African priests. In France, African clergy officially ministering to Catholic faithful make up a fifth of the country’s Catholic clergy. John Allen Jr has termed Africa clergy the ‘new Irish’.

The picture is not perfect, however. The Church in Africa has its weaknesses. Here we could point out, for example, the lack of doctrinal formation that plagues great parts of the Christian flock. A telling phenomenon is the fact that many Christian couples, young and old, live in un-solemnized unions. Perhaps too much value is still placed on traditional marriage rites at the expense of Church weddings. Theologians tell us that these weaknesses are only to be expected if the Church is something akin to a ‘field hospital’. There is much to hope for.

If we speak about the wider Christianity, there are more signs to worry about. The foremost is, I think, the sensational rise of the prosperity Gospel. There is something of a return to paganism  in it - one might quip that paganism never really left in the first place - when crowds of believers are gripped by swindlers who promise them financial well-being if they give generous offerings to the ministry. We know we have left the authentic Gospel when the salvation of Christ is reduced to ‘economic salvation’. New ‘prosperity churches’ are coming up every day to meet the insatiable demand for hope for economic salvation. If this prosperity gospel is inauthentic, can we expect it to really vivify African culture? My guess is no.

But where does this leave us? Are things falling apart? Maybe they are. But there are signs of hope as Christianity flourishes in Africa. If Ratzinger is right, then we can hope that African culture will come into its own on account of its Christianity.

1. Chinua Achebe (1975). “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness” (lecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst).

2. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (1993, March 3). “Christ, Faith and the Challenge of Cultures” (lecture given at a meeting with the Doctrinal Commissions of Asia in Hong Kong), available here.

3. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Christ, Faith and the Challenge of Cultures”.

4. See Christopher Dawson (1938), Progress and Religion: An Historical Inquiry, New York: Sheed and Ward (first published in 1929).

5. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Christ, Faith and the Challenge of Cultures”.

6. See Silvano Borruso (1998), The Art of Thinking, Pauline Publications Africa: Nairobi.

7. See Dawson’s work, Progress and Religion, for a convincing case for this example from history.

8. For example, the notion of the absoluteness of truth and goodness and the idea of the human essence/nature.

9. For example, the absolute claim of Christian salvation—that there is no salvation apart from Christ and His Church.

10. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Christ, Faith and the Challenge of Cultures”.