Kris Van der Bijl

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is often approached as a novel about collapse: the collapse of a society under colonial pressure and the collapse of a man not surviving the force of unwanted and imposed change.

Yet long before the arrival of missionaries and administrators, the novel is already attentive to arguably quieter intimate pressures.

Fear is one of them. Not Lovecraftian, but fear from an impending sense unnameable yet eerie. Think fear when there’s too many butterflies on your windshield.

It hangs through the text as something both habitual and brought in. We don’t know if it was a final coffin nail in Okonkwo’s life, but I’d argue that it was one of the causes of his own internal downfall.

And Achebe does not present fear as exceptional. By the time external forces intervene, fear has already done a lot of the work in his slip.

Okonkwo and the Fear of Weakness

Okonkwo’s fear is personal and specific. It takes shape early, in his rejection of his father, Unoka, whose gentleness, debt, and lack of ambition are read by the community as failure.

For Okonkwo, weakness becomes something that must be eradicated rather than understood, a notably regular claim to anyone who has read any kind of scholarship on the text. His life is organised around this avoidance.

Achebe shows how this fear is productive. Okonkwo works relentlessly, acquires wealth and titles, and earns respect. He conforms, even excels, within Umuofia’s expectations of masculinity.

Yet fear, once installed as a guiding principle, allows little room for judgement. It hardens into inflexibility.

I’d argue that compassion is treated as risk.

The killing of Ikemefuna exposes this logic most clearly. Okonkwo acts not because he must, but because he cannot tolerate the possibility of appearing weak.

But the decision secures nothing. Instead, it begins to loosen his place within his household and within himself.

Fear, here, does not preserve order; it dismantles it and leaves it hanging like a foreshadow for the texts closing image.

The Eerie and the Written Igbo Social Order

Fear is not confined to individual psychology. Achebe places it within the structures that sustain Igbo society.

Rituals, deities, and ancestral law function as stabilising forces, but they also reflect an anxiety about disruption. Balance must be maintained, and transgression is never without consequence.

The egwugwu, for example, embody communal authority. They are theatrical and solemn, reassuring and threatening at once.

Their power lies not only in judgement, but in the reminder that disorder is always possible. Fear, in this sense, supports continuity.

Gender expectations operate similarly. Masculinity is narrow and policed, femininity constrained by custom. These roles persist not solely through belief, but through the fear of destabilising a system that has long sustained the community.

Achebe presents this without romanticism or condemnation, allowing its internal logic to remain visible.

Colonialism and the Redirection of Fear

When colonialism arrives, it does not introduce fear so much as reorganise it. The new religion and administration unsettle existing structures, offering alternatives that some find appealing precisely because they loosen older constraints.

For Nwoye, conversion is less rebellion than relief.

For Okonkwo, however, colonial presence confirms his deepest anxieties.

Authority is no longer guaranteed, and strength no longer reads the same way. What he fears most is not change itself, but the erosion of a system in which he knows how to succeed.

The community’s response is fragmented. Fear does not produce unity. Some adapt, others resist, many hesitate. Achebe is careful here: the failure to respond collectively is not framed as moral weakness, but as the consequence of uncertainty and division.

Fear and Consequence in Things Fall Apart

By the novel’s end, Okonkwo’s isolation feels earned rather than imposed.

To me, Achebe’s achievement lies in showing how fear operates long before catastrophe becomes visible.

And it’s not just outside forces that can cause downfall. What happens internally cannot be ignored when writing a history of a man.

Things Fall Apart suggests that collapse is rarely sudden. It is prepared for, whisper-like, through ordinary decisions made in the name of strength, stability, and survival, and difficult to know if we’re on that path.