Ecology and Religion in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Abstract

Although African and Western literary scholars have explored diverse themes and issues in Chinua Achebe’s classic novel Things Fall Apart, there has been a marginal attention to the theme of ecology in scholarly engagements with the literary text. This neglect is reproduced in the works of African Christian theologians and scholars who have mainly studied and analyzed the novel through themes such as God, religion, morality, and violence. On account of the ecological silence in African theological engagement with Things Fall Apart, this article explores the rich ecological motifs in the novel in conversation with African Christian theology and religious thought. It argues that a rediscovery of the ecologically grounded and sustainable ways of living of our ancestors, as portrayed in the novel, can provide African and non-African ecological thinkers and practitioners with spiritual and ethical resources for addressing the ecological crisis facing Africa and our world. At the heart of this engagement are the new possibilities that Things Fall Apart offers for thinking theologically about ecological harmony and sustainability in the age of the Anthropocene. The article is an instance of ongoing calls for African theologians to take works of African literature seriously in theological discourse.

1. Introduction

In the over sixty-five years since Chinua Achebe, the father of modern African literature, published his first and bestselling novel Things Fall Apart (1958), one would expect that scholarly engagements with the novel would have sufficiently uncovered and dealt with the persistent ecological motifs present in the novel. This has not been the case. Although literary scholars, critical theorists, and postcolonial authors have studied and analyzed the novel through the lens of diverse themes such as colonialism, religion, violence, gender, tribe, language, family, marriage, patriarchy, identity, work, masculinity, traditions, fate, and freewill, ecological themes, though ubiquitous, have not been sufficiently explored. This gap is also evident in scholarly engagement with the novel in African theology, where attention has mostly focused on themes such as conceptions of God in African traditional religions and missionary Christianity (Orobator 2008, pp. 1–34), dynamics of power and colonial disruption (Katongole 2011, pp. 125–31), and communal moral decision-making (Odozor 2014, pp. 240–68). Even in the sub-field of African ecocriticism, it is in the last two decades that scholars have begun to pay significant attention to the novel’s persistent ecological motifs (Okoye-Ugwu 2013; Gogoi 2014; Muyumba 2020; Nwoma 2021; Egya 2024). As one scholar of early African environmental literary criticism notes, TFA can and should indeed be read as “an environmental novel” (Wu 2016, p. 141).

While this thematic overture toward environmentalism in TFA is not unconnected with the rise of planetary ecological consciousness in our time and the need to recover some of the lost ecological ethics in indigenous religio-cultural traditions that can help to address our current ecological predicaments, there is much more going on in the growing attention that TFA is generating among ecocritical scholars. According to Sule Emmanuel Egya (2024, p. 9), pioneer African writers of the twentieth century deployed nature in confronting and countering Western colonial discourse that labelled traditional African societies as “savage” and “primitive” due to the closeness of indigenous Africans with nature. Thus, “the natural world remains the forte of the African writer in presenting a civilisation that claims to be more all-embracing (of humans and their nonhuman others) than the Western one with emphasis on human exceptionalism” (Egya 2024, p. 10). The African human connection to the natural environment was the launching pad for many postcolonial African writers in their confrontation with colonial epistemological violence. This is equally true of Achebe’s TFA, although scholarly attention to the novel’s environmental themes has been scanty and, more so, affected by the analytical tools of ecocriticism, which are limited in their ability to discern and grasp the finer details of theological and spiritual value in literary texts. As such, even in the few instances where scholars have hinted on the ecological motifs in TFA, the portrait that emerges from their works has been rather fragmentary and incomplete.

Given the ecological silence in theological engagements with TFA, this article seeks to initiate a dialogue between Achebe’s novel and African Christian theology. This aligns with recent calls for the rediscovery and recovery of African indigenous ecological wisdom conveyed through narrative myths, ethical practices, and spiritual commitments that have been systematically eroded in the process of colonial encounters. As Stan Chu Ilo (2022, p. 6) argues, “there lies in the heart of Africa some rich ecological wisdom and traditions which need to be recovered and reappropriated by Africans in order to begin––in small ways––to protect, preserve, and guard the rich human, cultural, and natural wealth of the continent.” The claim of this article is that TFA is a vital resource in the task of rediscovering and reappropriating some of Africa’s rich ethical and spiritual resources that can respond to the ecological crisis facing Africa and our world.

For if our present ecological crisis is the result of the collapse of the intimate bond between God, human beings, and the earth, as Pope Francis (2015, #66) cogently argues in his encyclical Laudato Si’: On the Care for Our Common Home, then TFA teaches us how that tripartite bond sustained our ancestors and why it is still relevant for us today. This is a way of saying that TFA can show us new possibilities that abound for thinking theologically about ecological harmony and sustainability in the age of the Anthropocene. This article thus reflects a response to ongoing calls for African theologians to take African literature seriously in African theological discourse (Ngong 2023, pp. 6–7).

I present my argument in two main parts. In the first part, I provide a detailed overview of the ecological plot of TFA in order to contextualize how the people of Umuofia prioritized socio-ecological harmony within a tripodal paradigm of relationships with deities and spirits, human beings, and the land. In the second part, I offer a theological reading of the ecological motifs in TFA, analyzing more closely some of the environmental, spiritual, and socio-ethical issues that arise in the text in conversation with African (and some Western) eco-theologians and scholars. I then bring the discussion to a conclusion.

2. The Ecological Plot of Things Fall Apart

That Achebe portrays precolonial Igbo society in Umuofia (a pseudonymous village in south-eastern Nigeria) as one shaped by three intertwined relationships––to the deities and ancestral spirits, to human beings, and to the land––is not in doubt. In this opening chapter of TFA where Unoka, the father of the novel’s protagonist Okonkwo, besought the blessings of life, health, and protection from the deities and ancestral spirits before offering kola nut hospitality to his visiting friends (Achebe 2017, p. 7), the reader can already begin to appreciate the religious spirituality of the Umuofians, and how this spirituality shaped their relationships with one another and with the land. To fully mine the richness of these three forms of relationship in TFA, I will discuss the ecological plot of the novel through the following six key markers: 1. agrarian life; 2. spiritual identity and belonging; 3. respect for and peace with the land; 4. family and communal fellowship; 5. ecological and cultural epistemology; and 6. landscapes and forces of nature.

2.1. Agrarian Life

The people of Umuofia were grounded in the land. The occupations of most people in the village were farming, animal husbandry, and palm-wine tapping. Wealth was measured mostly by hard work and the bounty of one’s farm. We see this through the lens of Okonkwo: “During the planting season Okonkwo worked daily on his farms from cock-crow until the chickens went to roost. He was a very strong man and rarely felt fatigue” (Ibid, p. 13). At one end of his compound, he had two barns where his “long stacks of yam stood out prosperously” (Ibid, p. 13), and at the opposite end “a shed for the goats” (Ibid, p. 13–14). If Okonkwo, a farmer with two yam barns, three wives, and eight children (Ibid, p. 9), was considered wealthy by the standards of the time, Achebe tells us that there was a man wealthier than Okonkwo, named Nwakibie, “who had three huge barns, nine wives and thirty children” (Ibid, p. 17). “It was for this man that Okonkwo worked to earn his first seed yams” (Ibid, p. 17).

Seen through agrarian eyes, Umuofia esteemed hard work and loathed laziness or idleness. This was the precise point of contrast between Okonkwo and his father Unoka. For in a culture where parents ceded landed inheritance to their children, the fact that Unoka “had no yams” (Achebe 2017, p. 19) says more of handing over land or other property to his children. This is why, when he prepared to start his own farm, Okonkwo had to appeal to Nwakibie, whose farm he had worked on, to loan him some yams: “I have cleared a farm but have no yams to sow. I know what it is to ask a man to trust another with his yams, especially these days when young men are afraid of hard work. I am not afraid of work… If you give me some yam seeds I shall not fail you” (Ibid, p. 19). Although Okonkwo “had not hoped to get more than four hundred seeds,” Nwakibie surprised him: “I shall give you twice four hundred yams. Go ahead and prepare your farm” (Ibid, p. 19). To own a personal farm was esteemed in Umuofia. Not only was it a mark of respect; it also was a man’s way to prosperity. As Achebe tells us, sharecropping was “a very slow way of building up a barn of one’s own. After all the toil one only got a third of the harvest” (Ibid, p. 19). An important aspect of the agrarian culture in Umuofia that should not be overlooked is its gendered dimension. Yam, “the king of crops, was a man’s crop” (Ibid, p. 20), while women grew coco-yams, beans, cassava, maize, and melons (Ibid, pp. 20, 27). Moreover, sons were expected to take after their father while daughters took after their mother. Hence, like himself, “Okonkwo wanted his son [Nwoye] to be a great farmer” (Ibid, p. 27).

2.2. Spiritual Identity and Belonging

Although Umuofia had many gods and goddesses, at the center of its spiritual cosmology was a female deity called “Ani,” the earth goddess, who regulated both interpersonal relationships and relationships with the land (Ibid, p. 25). Indeed, Ani was “the source of all fertility” and “played a greater part in the life of the people than any other deity. She was the ultimate judge of morality and conduct. And what was more, she was in close communion with the departed fathers of the clan whose bodies had been committed to earth” (Ibid, p. 30). To show how connected the people of Umuofia were to Ani, they would always beseech her before the planting season. After a bountiful harvest, they also returned to give thanks to Ani (Ibid, p. 30), and then to the ancestors (Ibid, p. 32).

If the Umuofians worshipped Ani and other goddesses (Amadiora, the goddess of the sky and thunder, and Idemmili, the goddess of water) and revered and sacrificed to their ancestral spirits, these forms of obeisance served to cement the bonds not just between the living and the living-dead (ancestors), but also between the deities, the people, and the land. The protagonist “Okonkwo kept a wooden symbol of his personal god and of his ancestral spirits. He worshipped them with sacrifices of kola nut, food and palm wine, and offered prayers to them on behalf of himself, his three wives and eight children” (Ibid, p. 14). Okonkwo followed the example of his father Unoka who also paid obeisance to their ancestors (Ibid, p. 7). During times of misfortune, the Umuofians go to consult Agbala, the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves, to inquire about the reason for their fate, as Unoka did because “he always had a miserable harvest” (Ibid, p. 15). Not only was Agbala greatly feared by the people because of “his power” (Ibid, p. 15), his priestess also was revered because she “was full of the power of her god” (Ibid, p. 16). The sense that their lives, fates, and fortunes were intimately tied to their deities and ancestors gave spiritual meaning and moral orientation to the people of Umuofia. As Achebe notes, the way to know a man’s relationship standing with the spirit-world is through his harvest: “when a man is at peace with his gods and his ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm” (Ibid, p. 16).

2.3. Respect for and Peace with the Land

The Umuofians recognized that fertility and bounty were gifts of Ani, the earth goddess. They also imagined their relationship with Ani in relation to peace with the land. Between harvest and the next planting season, Umuofians observed a sacred week called “the Week of Peace” where the land is left fallow to heal and replenish. It was the sabbath of the land. During the Week of Peace, it was customary for Umuofians to maintain peace with one another. Violence of any sort was frowned at. “It was unheard of to beat somebody during the sacred week” (Ibid, p. 25). Thus, when Okonkwo beat his youngest wife Ojiugo because she went to plait her hair and did not return in time to prepare his afternoon meal, Ezeani, the priest of Ani, the earth goddess, showed up at his obi (living quarters) before dusk. In the spirit of Igbo hospitality, Okonkwo brought out kola and placed it before Ezeani, but Ezeani snapped: “Take away your kola nut. I shall not eat in the house of a man who has no respect for our gods and ancestors” (Ibid, p. 25). When Okonkwo tried to explain, Ezeani told him the following:

“You are not a stranger in Umuofia. You know as well as I do that our forefathers ordained that before we plant any crops in the earth we should observe a week in which a man does not say a harsh word to his neighbor. We live in peace with our fellows to honor our great goddess of the earth without whose blessing our crops will not grow. You have committed a great evil.” He brought down his staff heavily on the floor. “Your wife was at fault, but even if you came into your obi and found her lover on top of her, you would still have committed a great evil to beat her.” His staff came down again. “The evil you have done can ruin the whole clan. The earth goddess whom you have insulted may refuse to give us her increase, and we shall all perish”.

(Ibid, p. 25)

Okonkwo had to offer sacrifice of “one she-goat, one hen, a length of cloth and a hundred cowries” (Ibid, p. 25) at the shrine of Ani to appease her and the land. Worse still was when Okonkwo killed Ikemefuna, a boy that had been given as ransom to Umuofia by Mbaino for an Umuofia woman that was killed at the Mbaino market. Although the Oracle had decreed that Ikemefuna should be killed, Obierika, Okonkwo’s friend, and another elder, Ezeudu, cautioned him to have no hand in the boy’s death, a warning that Okonkwo failed to heed. Consequently, after the act, Obierika told Okonkwo, “What you have done will not please the Earth” (Ibid, p. 52). From the time after the murder of Ikemefuna, a series of misfortunes befell Okonkwo, which eventually culminated in his exile from Umuofia after he accidentally killed a 16-year-old boy at a funeral. Narrating this episode, Achebe said the following: “It was a crime against the earth goddess to kill a clansman, and a man who committed it must flee from the land” (Ibid, p. 94). The banishment of Okonkwo and other punishments meted out to him were meant to cleanse the land, “which Okonkwo had polluted with the blood of a clansman” (Ibid, p. 94).

2.4. Family and Communal Fellowship

The maintenance of ecological harmony that underwrites the Week of Peace in Umuofia had a social dimension. “No work was done during the Week of Peace. People called on their neighbors and drank palm-wine” (Ibid, p. 26). The period between the planting and harvest season was another important occasion for family fellowship: “At such times, in each of the countless thatched huts of Umuofia, children sat around their mother’s cooking fire telling stories, or with their father in his obi warming themselves from a log of fire, roasting and eating maize” (Ibid, p. 28). This rhythmic pattern of work and rest which ordered the family and communal life of Umuofia came to its climax during the Feast of New Yam, which was held every year just before the harvest began (Ibid, p. 30). The festival took place over the course of several days. It was a celebration of life, abundance, friendship, and fellowship, as well as a time for rest and relaxation after an exhaustive agricultural season. During the communal celebration, young men took part in wrestling contests, while the young girls of the village participated in cultural dance. Food and drinks were provided in abundance. Families were expected to invite their in-laws, friends, and neighbors from surrounding villages to join them in the celebration of the feast (Ibid, p. 32). Achebe captures the joy and abundance of the feast so graphically:

Men and women, young and old, looked forward to the New Yam Festival because it began the season of plenty––the new year. On the last night before the festival, yams of the old year were all disposed of by those who still had them. The new year must begin with tasty, fresh yams and not the shriveled and fibrous crop of the previous year. All cooking pots, calabashes and wooden bowls were thoroughly washed, especially the wooden mortar in which yam was pounded. Yam foo-foo and vegetable soup was the chief food in the celebration. So much of it was cooked that, no matter how heavily the family ate or how many friends and relatives they invited from the neighboring villages, there was always a large quantity of food left over at the end of the day. The story was always told of a wealthy man who set before his guests a mound of foo-foo so high that those who sat on one side could not see what was happening on the other, and it was not until late in the evening that one of them saw for the first time his in-law who had arrived during the course of the meal and had fallen to the opposite side. It was only then that they exchanged greetings and shook hands over what was left of the food.

(Ibid, pp. 30–31)

This convivial ecology in Umuofia was not restricted to the New Yam festival. It also pervaded the celebration of marriage during which the whole community would gather at the home of the bride’s parents. Women brought various food items such as coco-yams, plantains, and fish to supplement the preparation of food, and also took part in the cooking. The men brought pots of palm wine, and, while the women were cooking, they sat together drinking and conversing among themselves. The children went to the stream to fetch clean water, which was used for the cooking (Ibid, pp. 84–85). Achebe describes the family compound of the bride during this period as “busy as an anthill” (Ibid, p. 86), with people flocking to the celebration. It would be incomplete to talk about ecological harmony in Umuofia without paying attention to this social ecology of life. If any member of the community was celebrating, it was the whole community celebrating.

2.5. Ecological and Cultural Epistemology

In several places in TFA, Achebe illustrates how grounded Umuofia’s children were in the cultural epistemology of their ecosystem. Although we first get a sense of this from Ikemefuna, the boy who was brought from Mbaino to Umuofia, the Umuofians displayed this distinctive quality too. The reason Okonkwo’s first son Nwoye was inseparably drawn to Ikemefuna was because “he seemed to know everything. He could fashion out flutes from bamboo stems and even from the elephant grass. He knew the names of all the birds and could set clever traps for the little bush rodents. And he knew which trees made the strongest bows” (Ibid, p. 23). Ikemefuna’s knowledge went beyond his familiarity with a wide range of tree and animal species, or with the creativity of making bows. “Ikemefuna had an endless stock of folk tales. Even those which Nwoye knew already were told with a new freshness and the local flavor of a different clan…. Nwoye even remembered how he had laughed when Ikemefuna told him that the proper name for a corn cob with only a few scattered grains was eze-agadi-nwayi, or the teeth of an old woman” (Ibid, p. 28).

There is no doubt that this repository of cultural knowledge was passed on from parents to children. Achebe tells us that Okonkwo invited the boys of his household to his obi, and shared “stories of the land” (Ibid, p. 42) with them. The women did the same to their girl children. Some of the stories transmitted by parents to their children include tales of the tortoise and his cunning, the bird eneke-nti-oba who challenged the world to a wrestling contest and was finally defeated by the cat, and the quarrel between Earth and Sky and how Sky withdrew rain from Earth for seven years until the Vulture was sent as emissary to plead with Sky (Ibid, p. 42). The story of why Tortoise’s shell is rough and not smooth is perhaps the most captivating of all the folktales that Okonkwo’s children knew and told (Ibid, pp. 74–76). Although these folk stories were mostly about the animal world, they were told and retold in order to convey deep and abiding moral lessons such as the importance of cultivating virtues of truth, honesty, wisdom, solidarity, compassion, fortitude, and valor. The cultural knowledge of the people of Umuofia is further demonstrated by their keen awareness of the plants, roots, and trees with healing and medicinal properties. For instance, when his most beloved daughter Ezinma fell sick, Okonkwo took his machete and went straight into the bush “to collect the leaves and grasses and barks of trees that went into making the medicine for iba [fever]” (Ibid, pp. 59, 65–66).

2.6. Landscapes and Forces of Nature

From the opening page of TFA, Achebe introduces his readers to the environmental landscape of Umuofia. Almost every page of the first sixteen chapters of the novel is brimming with graphic intimations of the nature, beauty, and process of life in the ecosystem. Early on, we find Unoka talking with his friends about the “dazzling beauty” of the morning sun (Ibid, p. 6), and about “the heavy rains” (Ibid, p. 7). The sun was an object of communicative proverbial wisdom, as we hear Unoka say to his friends, “Our elders say that the sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them” (Ibid, p. 80). Achebe writes a lot about the “moonlit night” (Ibid, p. 10) when the “happy voices of children playing in open fields would then be heard” (Ibid, p. 10). Some nights, silence envelopes the village: “a vibrant silence made more intense by the universal thrill of a million, million forest insects” (Ibid, p. 10). Achebe speaks about “dangerous animals” such as a snake which “was never called by its name at night, because it would hear” (Ibid, p. 10). The biodiversity of Umuofia is conveyed in TFA from insects, kites, birds, locusts, ants, and chickens, to banana, palm, udala [African star apple], and iroko trees, including various species of roots, trees, and grasses. The dawn of day is marked by the first crow of the cock (Ibid, p. 83). Achebe describes the coming of locusts during the cold harmattan season as “a tremendous sight, full of power and beauty” (Ibid, p. 44). Cosmic elements such as the sun, moon, rainfall, thunder, and wind, as well as landscapes such as bushes, forests, rivers, and streams, are so deeply vital and socially embodied in Umuofia such that Achebe does not mind occasionally personifying them. Here is an example:

At last the rain came. It was sudden and tremendous. For two or three moons the sun had been gathering strength till it seemed to breathe a breath of fire on the earth. All the grasses had long been scorched brown, and the sands felt like live coals to the feet. Evergreen trees wore a dusty coat of brown. The birds were silenced in the forests, and the world lay panting under the live, vibrating heat. And then came the clap of thunder. It was an angry, metallic and thirsty clap, unlike the deep and liquid rumbling of the rainy season. A mighty wind arose and filled the air with dust. Palm trees swayed as the wind combed their leaves into flying crests like strange and fantastic coiffure… The earth quickly came to life and the birds in the forests fluttered around and chirped merrily. A vague scent of life and green vegetation was diffused in the air. As the rain began to fall soberly and in small liquid drops, children sought for shelter, and all were happy, refreshed, and thankful.

(Ibid, pp. 99–100)

Although the elements of nature are mostly benevolent, they also occasionally exhibit caprice. TFA conveys this unpredictability through an eight-week period of drought at the beginning of one planting season, which led to Okonkwo’s loss of four hundred seed-yams (Ibid, p. 20). Worst of all was a torrential rain that again dealt a heavy blow to Okonkwo the year he took eight-hundred seed-yams from Nwakibie. It was “the worst year in living memory” (Ibid, p. 21). On account of the destruction and loss wrought by the rainstorm, one Umuofian “tied his cloth to a tree branch and hanged himself” (Ibid, p. 21). While the people of Umuofia hardly interfered with these extreme forces of nature, some of their activities may have contributed to the caprice that natural forces displayed.

I will now turn over to the second part of this article, where I theologically analyze the ecological motifs in TFA. I will carry out this analysis in conversation with African and Western ecotheological authors.

3. An Ecotheological Analysis of Things Fall Apart

Before beginning the ecotheological analysis of TFA, it is important to situate this creative reading of the novel in the context of the author’s intention. In writing TFA, Achebe wanted to show how life was structured and organized in precolonial Igbo societies before the contact with European colonialism and missionary Christianity. This explains why the dualities of tradition/modernity and Igbo/European, which form the thematic core of TFA, are considered “the source of the novel’s narrative power” (Ochiagha 2018, p. 16). My ecological reading of the novel in this article is not inconsistent with this authorial intention. On the contrary, the ubiquitous ecological narratives in TFA spotlight the complex nature of the disruption brought about by the meeting of these two social forces that continue to shape the trends and trajectories of modernity in Africa. As Egya (2024, p. 17) points out, “colonial intrusion in Umuofia crudely disrupts its natural world, and as such the nonhuman beings, spiritual and non-spiritual, should be considered as victims (along with humans) of the tragedy that befalls the community.” Taking into account this authorial intention of the novel, I will now carry out an ecotheological appraisal of TFA through the same six ecological markers that I have outlined.

3.1. Agrarian Life

The agrarian life of the people of Umuofia conveys a deep appreciation of the importance of work on the land for individual and communal prosperity. Just like in the first book of the Bible, where humans are given the task by God to till the earth and to care for it (cf. Genesis 2:15), the Umuofians believe that they have received the gift of the earth from Ani, and that responsible stewardship of the land is a moral obligation attached to this gift. Consequently, work on the land is not to be seen as beneath one’s dignity, but as the path to the full realization of one’s dignity. From a Christian point of view, work is not a burden, but a way that humans exercise stewardship of the gift of creation (Agang 2020, p. 82).

Given the centrality of work on the land, it is understandable why Umuofia did not experience food insecurity. Umuofia was economically prosperous because food was in abundant supply. Today, Africa suffers from a crisis of food security. In 2024, an estimated 351.4 million people in sub-Saharan Africa were food insecure (Cardell and Zereyesus 2024). Between June and August of that year, 55 million people in West and Central Africa struggled to feed themselves due to the proliferation of conflicts in the region (World Food Programme 2024). Over the last few years in north-central Nigeria, agrarian communities have been displaced due to violent insurgency from Jihadist groups. Able-bodied men and women who were economically productive as farmers have now become refugees in their own land. Where conflict is not the cause of food insecurity, political, economic, and cultural factors have played a role in the crisis.

From a cultural point of view, some young people in Africa see work on the land as “primitive” and “backward,” and consider a white-collar job with a university degree as a superior form of work. This idea has led to the alienation of many young people from the land. African scholars have noted how young people, seduced by the lure of modern life and material notions of “progress,” sell their family/ancestral lands in the village and relocate to urban centers, only to end up in slums and informal settlements along the edges of the city (Katongole 2022). Using the fleeting social experience of life among young people in Ivoirian urban centers as a case study, Nathanael Yaovi Soede (2018, pp. 157–80) has argued that what is happening to Africans is an anthropological crisis rooted in cultural distortion. Politically and economically, a lack of access to land caused by population explosion, land grabbing, discordant land tenure systems, and gender-based discrimination, among other factors, constrains the opportunities available to those who are ready to work the land and contribute to the productive economy.

In TFA, the coming of missionary Christianity made many able-bodied young men, who should work the land and contribute to communal prosperity, abandon the ways of life of Umuofia. The speech by an elder from the adjoining village of Mbanta to young people when Okonkwo hosted a big feast conveys the sentiments about the disruption brought by this new religion: “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” (Achebe 2017, p. 128). The Ghanaian theologian Ben-Willie Kwaku Golo argues that missionary Christianity was a vehicle for the civilizing mission of Europeans who desired to immerse Africans into Western thought forms and culture that were at the time considered more progressive and rational. “The results of this imperialist attitude toward Africa and Africans were the scandalous rejection of the African experience of reality as well as an appreciation of what the natural world actually means to them” (Golo 2018, p. 141).

Without attempting to romanticize life in precolonial Africa, it is imperative for Africa to recover the architecture of agricultural life that sustained Umuofia if Africa is to begin to address its food crisis and other socio-economic ills. Agrarian life in Umuofia offers an antidote to the uniquely modern crisis of alienation from the land, which feeds into the crisis of poverty and job unemployment that is ravaging Africa. As Emmanuel Katongole (2018, p. 225) argues, Africans need to re-learn how to cultivate “a love affair with soil.”

3.2. Spiritual Identity and Belonging

The claim that religion pervades, imbricates, and is intertwined with all aspects of life in Africa is firmly established in scholarly accounts of African philosophy and social life (Mbiti 1969, pp. 1–2). Unlike in the West, where the process of secularization has negatively impacted adherence to religion, for Africans, religion still ranks high among the most important factors that shape individual and social life. However, most Africans today appear to be caught in a double bind whereby vestiges of colonial Christianity continue to compromise efforts to deepen positive aspects of their African indigenous religious and cultural heritage. For many African Christians, adhering to the Christian faith means enforcing a radical break with everything “traditional,” while others have tried to initiate a dialogue between faith and culture through the process of inculturation, where positive elements of African traditional religious spirituality and the Christian faith mutually enrich each other. Nonetheless, as a result of the crisis brought about by the meeting of African cultural traditions and Western culture through the medium of colonial and missionary encounters, African theologians continue to debate what it means to be “truly Christian” and “truly African” (Odozor 2014, pp. 87–115).

This crisis features in the final chapters of TFA, where Achebe shows how the coming of missionary Christianity marked a turning point in the religious cosmology of Umuofia and its environs. One scholar has noted that the effect of Christian missions on traditional Igbo society as conveyed by TFA was “cataclysmic” (Searle 2007, p. 49). To put this disruption in context, Achebe narrates the content of the preaching by a British missionary in Mbanta:

And he told them about this new God, the Creator of all the world and all the men and women. He told them that they worshipped false gods, gods of wood and stone. A deep murmur went through the crowd when he said this. He told them that the true God lived on high and that all men when they died went before Him for judgment. Evil men and all the heathen who in their blindness bowed to wood and stone were thrown into a fire that burned like palm-oil. But good men who worshipped the true God lived forever in His happy kingdom. “We have been sent by this great God to ask you to leave your wicked ways and false gods and turn to Him so that you may be saved when you die,” he said.

(Achebe 2017, p. 110)

When an old man interrogated the missionary about the specific identity of this new God, citing the names of the gods of Umuofia as example, the missionary replied, “All the gods you have named are not gods at all. They are gods of deceit who tell you to kill your fellows and destroy innocent children. There is only one true God and He has the earth, the sky, you and me and all of us…. Your gods are not alive and cannot do you any harm… They are pieces of wood and stone” (Ibid, p. 111). Two key issues emerge in this conversation.

Firstly, a Christian theological narrative both displaces and replaces the indigenous theological narrative. The missionary reduces the deities of Umuofia to naught, while his Christian God is elevated and proposed as the only true deity. Conversion to Christianity meant not only the abandonment but also the ridicule of the deities of Umuofia. It is thus understandable why some new converts to the white man’s religion became so impudent and went as far as “killing the sacred python, the emanation of the god of water” (Ibid, p. 120). Reflecting on the role of Kikuyu ecological wisdom in reinforcing identity and regulating ecological–human–social relationships, the renowned Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Wangari Maathai (2010, pp. 49–55) laments how the embrace of Western Christianity and culture opened deep ecological wounds visible across African societies, especially in the loss of biodiversity, rapid deforestation, disrespect for nature, and commercialization of ecological goods.

Secondly, by pointing out the killing of twins and others in Umuofia as a practice sanctioned by local deities, the missionary highlights a moral problem. This is one way by which TFA exposes the moral complexities in precolonial African societies. Odozor (2014, pp. 240–44) has dealt considerably with this moral complexity in his analysis of the circumstances surrounding Okonkwo’s killing of Ikemefuna, which had been sanctioned by the deities and the community. Odozor points out the dangers and limitations in communal moral decision-making, especially when what is commanded is evil. Such a consensus is, in his view, morally flawed. Arguing in favor of individual responsibility, he insists that “human beings must exercise right judgment and act out of freedom, and must never allow themselves to become instruments for evil, even if it is to please the divinity” (Odozor 2014, p. 243).

In this regard, there is something positive about the coming of Christianity to Umuofia insofar as the precepts of Christianity challenge various forms of culturally sanctioned violence in the community. The irony, however, is that the evangelical rhetoric and practices of the Christian missionary also institute new forms of violence in the cosmology of Umuofia. As Katongole (2011, p. 128) has pointed out, what is thematically operational in Umuofia is a clash of two forms of violence, “each seeking to dominate the other.” In the face of Umuofia’s contact with the white man’s religion, a collapse ensued in the lifeworld of traditional African societies. Exploring this issue from the operations of European missionaries in the New World, the American theologian Willie Jennings (2010, pp. 72–102) argues that colonial logics were deployed by missionaries to subjugate indigenous peoples in conquered lands in the name of God and Christ. These colonial logics overturned the spiritual stability of indigenous worlds. In Africa, residues of the violence of colonial Christianity on indigenous religious systems continue to produce deformed and deforming intellectual currents that reinforce the African identity crisis.

From a Christian theological perspective, the contact between these two religious systems reveals points of “continuity and discontinuity between African Traditional Religion and culture and the message of Christianity” (Conradie 2020, p. 169). Several African theologians have discussed this issue. For some, there is no continuity, common ground, or meeting point between the two religious systems. The theologians who hold this view argue that “there is no revelation and no salvation in African religion, as Christianity is the only true religion” (Wijsen 2016, p. 194). If this is true, then African religions are false forms. This mission theology shaped the European Christian mission in Africa, as revealed in TFA where the British missionary in Umuofia displaced the traditional African theological narrative on God and salvation with the Christian theological narrative, urging the people to turn away from the worship of false gods and embrace the God of Jesus Christ. However, for an African theologian such as Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator, SJ, there are several points of continuity, and the African religious heritage can well be integrated into Christian faith. For instance, while there may be different points of emphasis and different names for the supreme deity, Orobator (2008, p. 19) argues that “the belief in God is native to Africa. God is not a stranger to Africans.” In a sense, this means that it was not Christianity that introduced God to Africa. The distinctiveness of Christianity is not the God factor but the Jesus factor. For Orobator (2008, p. 27), what really distinguishes Christianity from African religions is the doctrine of the Trinity, which is “quite unlike our African conceptions of God.”

3.3. Respect for and Peace with the Land

In the advent of colonial, liberal capitalist modernity, the dominant logic of the human relationship to the land has become extractive, transactional, exploitative, and commoditized. This accords with the view that the most profound changes caused by imperialism were not social or political but ecological and biological (Crosby 2004, p. 7). Contrary to this logic, for indigenous cultures and societies, “land is not a commodity but rather a gift from God, and from their ancestors who rest there, a sacred space” (Pope Francis 2015, #146). This is true of Africa. In traditional African societies, the grammar of land “transcends economics into a breadth of social, spiritual, and political significance. Among other things, it is considered as the place of birth; the place where the ancestors are laid to rest; the place which the creator has designated to be passed down to successive generations; and the final resting place for every child born on its surface” (Alao 2007, p. 63). This ideal comes to life in TFA. The Umuofians are a people who held the land as a sacred and spiritual trust. This underscores the seriousness with which the gatekeepers of their spiritual lifeworld tried to enforce moral codes and norms relating to the honor and dishonor of the land. For instance, when Okonkwo’s gun accidently killed a 16-year-old boy during the burial of a village chief, he was exiled from the land for seven years. Not only was killing a clansperson abominable, it also was construed as an offense against the land. Remarkably, Okonkwo’s participation in the killing of Ikemefuna, though sanctioned by the Oracle, was also seen in this light. As his friend Obierika forcefully told him, “What you have done will not please the Earth. It is the kind of action for which the goddess wipes out whole families” (Achebe 2017, p. 52).

This precolonial African understanding of land as a spiritual reality can also be seen in the opening pages of the Bible. After the disobedience of Adam and Eve, they were both banished from the Garden of Eden, where the Lord God had placed them (cf. Genesis 3:23–24). When Cain killed his brother Abel, his punishment was estrangement from the land and from God (cf. Genesis 4:12–16). In fact, God said to Cain, “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand” (Genesis 4:10–11, NASB). When Jezebel conspired with her husband King Ahab to dispossess poor Naboth of his vineyard by killing him, God sent a message to Ahab through his prophet Elijah, saying, “In the place where the dogs licked up the blood of Naboth, the dogs will lick up your blood, yours as well” (1 Kings 21:19, NASB).

Drawing from TFA and the Bible, African Christian theology can facilitate the recovery of a hermeneutic of violence as not just a grievous sin against God and against human beings, but also against the land. Consequently, Christian approaches to reconciliation must find ways of integrating practices of confession, reparation, and healing of the land as an essential dimension of holistic ecological, human, and social wellbeing.

3.4. Family and Communal Fellowship

TFA illustrates the beauty of family and communal living in Umuofia. The convivial atmosphere where parents and children sit together, eat together, and tell one another stories extended beyond the family to the whole clan. Children often gathered under the moonlight to play. The ilo was the green area in the village where assemblies for sports, dance, fellowship, and discussions were held. Through feasts such as the New Yam festival, marriage ceremonies, and funerals, the entire community and its neighbors celebrated life, industry, friendship, and fellowship. In addition to these, Umuofia enjoyed an ecology of social support as clans-people tried to help and be hospitable to one another. Whether it was Nwakibie, who loaned Okonkwo 800 seed-yams to start his own farm, or Okonkwo’s friend Obierika, who helped to sell his yams while he was in exile and brought the proceeds to him in Mbanta, it is evident that a strong social bond existed in the people.

The Umuofia example stresses that integral ecology is not simply about safeguarding the physical environment; protecting the social environment is equally important. If environmental and social degradation go together, as Pope Francis (2015, #49) tells us, then “a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach.” This social approach is very much needed in our times. Despite the increasing integration of people through the forces of globalization, our modern world has not succeeded in overcoming individual isolation and social fragmentation. Pope Francis (2013) has spoken about the “globalization of indifference” which is evident in the growing lack of concern for the good welfare of others. One of the symptoms of this growing indifference in Africa is evident in urban planning, where the wealthy elite segregate themselves and live in choice locations beyond the reach of the ordinary citizens, whereas traditional African societies prioritized forms of social life that were more communal and inclusive rather than individualistic and exclusive.

African societies need to tear down the wall of separation that makes socialization, recreation, solidarity, and fraternity impossible between the children of the rich and the poor. We do not have to idealize Umuofia to appreciate the beauty of cultivating a shared identity as a people. It is in the context of community life, as Umuofia exemplifies, that fraternity and social friendship are cultivated and promoted. Nowhere is this shared communal life better expressed in TFA than when Okonkwo invited his kinsmen in Mbanta to his New Yam Feast. As they drank palm wine, one of the oldest members of the clan rose to thank Okonkwo, leaving a wisdom that continues to resonate in modern African appreciations of the text. He said the following: “A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so” (Achebe 2017, p. 127). This shared communal life, however, does not prevent or save Okonkwo from being exiled from Umuofia when he committed an abomination against the land, as we have already pointed out in the foregoing sub-section. While it may seem that Okonkwo’s punishment goes against the spirit of communalism that Umuofia portrays, it is one of the ways that Umuofia regulates its moral ecology to prevent a breakdown of the social–moral order.

3.5. Ecological and Cultural Epistemology

One of the distinguishing marks of the children of Umuofia was their rootedness in their ecosystem. As we saw through Ikemefuna, Nwoye, and Ezinma, not only did these children of Okonkwo know a range of plant and animal species, but they also were grounded in the folk stories of their people. It was therefore understandable that Umuofia would be incensed when Enoch, the son of the snake priest, who had adopted “the white man’s religion,” desecrated a masked spirit (Ibid, p. 142), or when an osu (outcast) from Mbanta who had become a Christian killed a sacred python (Ibid, pp. 120–21). In contrast to Okonkwo’s children, who were grounded in their people’s cultural epistemology, Enoch and the osu’s embrace of Christianity had made them turn their backs on the customs and traditions of their people.

Several African authors have written copiously about how the advent of European colonialism and missionary Christianity played a key role in the disruption of the ways of life of the African people. Writing about the experience of the Kikuyus at the onset of colonialism, Maathai (2010, pp. 95–97) argues that the demonization of African indigenous ecological conservation practices were part and parcel of the colonial policy of conquest and occupation. By deconstructing indigenous belief systems as “pagan,” “primitive,” and “demonic,” some of the European missionaries got entangled in the destruction of sacred symbols, sites, and species that Africans had considered untouchable for ecological conservation purposes. The ascendancy of extractive capitalism has led to the reckless exploitation of Africa’s natural resources, which is furthering the rapid loss of biodiversity and the ecological impoverishment of African peoples, especially the young. The concern raised by the Kenyan ecological educationist Kinikonda Okemasisi (2022, pp. 136–37) is worth reflecting upon:

When I was growing up in the 1970s, we used to fetch water from beautiful flowing streams in cool forests full of biodiversity. We used to collect dry firewood here, chase after lovely butterflies of different sizes and colors, play with and scare one another with colorful chameleons, and pick and eat different types of berries, the names of which we knew only in our mother indigenous tongues. However, now, because of deforestation, none of these plants, animals, or resources can be found in that locality. We cannot tell the young people today about the natural fruits and berries we used to enjoy, because we lack the equivalent word in English. We understood them so well by their local names, but the youth today cannot even fathom their existence. They do not know what they have missed…. Only on Google––if their parents are lucky enough to possess a smartphone––can they see a beautiful butterfly, a chameleon, or any number of other species. Only the wealthy can afford to take their children to the zoo or the animal orphanage to see what the people of my generation saw without any cost whatsoever.

Pope Francis (2015, #143) has argued that two patrimonies are under threat today: the patrimony of nature and the patrimony of culture. These patrimonies are part of the shared identity of each community and place and are the foundations upon which we build our common home. He advocates for a greater attention to local cultures and traditions and respect for the rights of indigenous communities. Similarly, Karen Armstrong points out that human history has been shaped not just by scientific logic but more importantly by the myths and stories through which people were introduced to deeper truths that could not be apprehended by science. At the dawn of Enlightenment modernity, the ascendancy of science led to the denigration of myths as false, primitive, and outmoded. This loss has to be rectified. Indeed, “we may be unable to return wholesale to a premodern sensibility, but we can acquire a more nuanced understanding of the myths of our ancestors because they still have something to teach us” (Armstrong 2022, p. 24). As it did for the children of Umuofia, this understanding can help Africans and people around the world to deepen the spiritual commitment that animated how their ancestors related with the environment.

3.6. The Landscape and Forces of Nature

In TFA, Achebe focuses significantly on the beautiful landscape of Umuofia. He portrays nature as a gift from the deities for communal wellbeing and prosperity. This view counters the logic of instrumentalism and extractivism which has come to characterize dominant models of economic development in Africa and especially in the West. For when we take “a sober look at our world today,” we will see that “the degree of human intervention, often in the service of business interest and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey, even as technological advances and consumer goods continue to abound limitlessly” (Pope Francis 2015, #34). As human beings given the mandate by God to steward creation, according to the Judeo-Christian vision, we need to cure ourselves of the illusion that “we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves” (ibid). A rehabilitated ecological theology will help us to appreciate the coexistence and beauty of the human and nonhuman creation in a community of fellowship. While the caprice of natural phenomena, as we see exhibited in Umuofia, may be beyond human control, attention needs to be given in our time to the underlying human causes of environmental disruptions and climate change, and the consequences these have on poor and vulnerable communities.

In this context, it is evident that Umuofia is also not free of blame. Achebe shows that, while Umuofia, on the one hand, displays a reverence for nature, on the other hand, it also engages in the exploitation of nature. Focusing on the anthropocentrism in TFA, Chukwu Romanus Nwoma (2021, pp. 454–58) argues that both internal and external human forces subvert the natural environment in Umuofia. Some of the negative environmental practices which the human community in the novel is engaged in include bush burning, deforestation, and similar negative agricultural practices that pollute the environment and destroy the soil. The severity of these forms of human intervention in the environment is partly responsible for provoking harsh climatic conditions such as excessive heat and rainstorms, which destroyed farm crops, affected animal biodiversity, and compromised agricultural productivity. Expressions in the novel such as “vibrating heat,” “exhausted farms,” and “reluctant soil” acutely convey the socio-ecological precarity of Umuofia caused by environmental degradation. Of no little effect is the gradual disappearance of the forest (Wu 2012). In the face of the sufferings of victims of environmental tragedies, African societies like societies anywhere else need to build a new solidarity of social love that encompasses care for the environment in its human and nonhuman elements, as the key to advancing integral development. In advocating for a full recovery of the animist sensibility that endures in varying degrees in African societies, Cajetan Iheka (2018, p. 21) argues that nonhumans are “important members of the biosphere worth human respect even when they seem nonresponsive.” Due to the interconnectedness of human beings and the environment, the destruction of the environment inevitably compromises the possibilities of full human flourishing. It is therefore imperative for African societies to recover an awareness of the interdependence of cultural ecology and natural ecology in the quest for a more integral and sustainable future (Egya 2016).

4. Conclusions

This article has explored the rich ecological motifs in Achebe’s TFA in conversation with African and Christian theology. It provided a detailed overview of the ecological plot of TFA in order to contextualize how the people of Umuofia prioritized ecological harmony within a tripodal paradigm of relationships with deities and spirits, human beings, and the land. It further offered a theological reading of the ecological motifs in the novel, raising environmental, spiritual, and socio-ethical issues as they arise in the text and in contemporary African experience. Central to the argument of the article is the view that a rediscovery of the ecologically grounded and sustainable ways of living of our ancestors, as vividly portrayed in the novel, can provide Africans and non-Africans with both spiritual and ethical resources for addressing the present ecological crisis facing Africans and our world. The dominance of extractive capitalism in Africa today, which is one of the causes of our present crisis, has its roots in the time period that Achebe focuses on in his novel. Although Umuofia was not an ideal or perfect society—and TFA brings this to light in several ways—it socially embodied various spiritual, ethical, and ecological commitments that are very much needed today.

Just as Umuofia searched for values to assure its stability in the face of violent colonial encounters and a period of rapid changes, so too is contemporary Africa battling for its soul and searching for new ways to survive in this perilous order. What Willene P. Taylor (1998, p. 27) refers to as a “crisis of the soul” in his description of the travails of Umuofia aptly captures the situation of Africa today in the face of the aggressive exploitation of Africa’s natural resources, the degradation of African lands, and the decimation of African lives. The ongoing resource war in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the toxic pollution of air, land, and water in the oil-producing Delta region of Nigeria, the brutality and violence associated with artisanal mining of gold in Ghana, and the insatiable hunger for ‘blood diamonds’ in Sierra Leone are some of the prominent cases in the deadliest theatres of environmental ‘slow violence’ ravaging Africa. The overriding goal of this article has been to argue that TFA plays an important role in the task of raising our ecological and social awareness and motivating us to a more passionate care and concern for all of creation.