HOW THE CENTRE IS MADE TO HOLD IN THINGS FALL APART NEIL TEN KORTENAAR Université Sainte-Anne A. whole volume has been written by Emmanuel Meziemadu Okoye on the encounter between traditional Igbo religion and Christianity in the novels of Chinua Achebe, a volume which concludes that Achebe has done his research and that his depiction of the colonization of Igboland is historically accurate. Fiction, of course, cannot be judged by its verifiability; it expresses not what happened but what might have happened. Precisely because it must be plausible, however, fiction has to meet standards of correspondence and be adequate as an image of the human experience of the world (Ricoeur, Temps III 278). Okoye’s desire to establish the accuracy of Achebe’s fiction is not misplaced. However, if we consider the novels as historiography and judge how faithful they are to the past, it is not just the details of culture and of incident that must be considered. The writing of history has two components: it depends on verifiable facts and it arranges those facts in a narrative. How does Achebe establish his narrative authority when writing about a period more than fifty years in the past, and more particularly about a world-view that has lost its original integrity? Things Fall Apart ends with the decision taken by a historian to recount the process whereby a whole world was overturned. The narrative this histo rian will write is not, however, the one the reader has just finished reading, but a less objective and necessarily less accurate narrative. In the final pages the new District Commissioner walks away from the site of Okonkwo’s suicide and wonders whether to make Okonkwo’s death a chapter or a paragraph in his projected book, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. This appeal to an obviously false authority deploys irony to establish Achebe’s own credentials as a historian of Igboland.1We do not ask why we should trust the narrative we have just read: the District Commissioner’s projected history and by implication other texts on Africa stand condemned as manifestly untrustworthy, and that is enough. We deconstruct what is told us of the District Commissioner and reconstruct a higher level where we join the author in seeing around the Europeans. But where exactly is this higher level? In Things Fall Apart the District Commissioner’s false narrative assumes the otherness of the Africans. Humanity is not one. What the District English Stu d ie s in Ca n a d a , x v ii, 3, September 1991 Commissioner finds of interest in Okonkwo’s suicide is its mystery: its im penetrability as an example of the foreignness, the difference of supposed primitives. By fitting Okonkwo into a comprehensible narrative, the Com missioner establishes both Okonkwo’s essential otherness and his own heroic character — his narrative says in effect, “I have travelled through Africa and seen such things for myself” — thus eliminating the threat of that difference. To underline the falsity of this version of events Achebe must reestablish the humanity of his Africans, must insist that Africans live in the same world and are not absolutely other. The effect of Achebe’s plain style — in spite of what Weinstock and Ra madan argue, it is singularly stripped of symbol — is to stress the everyday ordinariness of Igbo life. This world is comprehensible. The transition in the book from pre-colonization Africa to an Africa that has felt the European presence is, in terms of style, unremarkable. Indeed, because the transition is so fluid, Achebe has to draw our attention to it by means of divisions: the encroachment of the European missionaries takes place while Okonkwo is in exile, during the division identified as Part Two. C.L. Innes has pointed out how in Things Fall Apart when Mr. Brown the missionary and Akunna, one of the great men of the village of Umuofia, discuss God, they misunderstand each other. But more remarkable is how they can discuss and learn from each other at all, as clearly they do: their mutual tolerance and their open-mindedness are applauded by the author and contrasted with the fanaticism...