Things Fall Apart

By Tom Lamia

When I was a mere lad of 29 and a recent law school graduate full of adventurous spirits, I was a lecturer in law in Africa for two academic years; the first in Nigeria, the second in Zambia. There were others like me at the time (1966 to 1968). Our help was welcomed to fill lectureships left vacant or newly created as British colonial rule was transferred to exuberant but unready leaders, experienced in political struggle but untrained in government administration.

The setting for this story is Nigeria at the time of its independence. The independence celebrations lifted all spirits in 1960 but were soon followed by ethnic conflict and civil war. It is a textbook study in disastrous consequences from high expectations. A country with enviable natural and human resources burdened by a legacy of ethnic rivalries that exploded at birth. With every good intention, its elites failed in a series of miseries brought on by unyielding tribal competition, such that the best qualities of each of its major ethnic groups were subsumed to tribal loyalty. Military coups removed the constitutional design of shared power among the major ethnic groups and set off a cascade of tribal violence that made national institutions unworthy of the name. The military held the balance of power, but was neutralized by tribal divisions among Ibo, Hausa and Yoruba-led battalions. Throughout Nigeria corruption ruled, as it always had. 

These were the conditions that led to the Biafran War (1967-1970), a civil war between seceding Ibo-led forces from Nigeria’s Eastern Region and Federal Republic forces in the West, North and Mid-West Regions. The Ibos declared their territory to be the Republic of Biafra. Many lives were lost on both sides before a negotiated peace was achieved. 

Regional boundaries were redrawn and a new capital reduced the frictional element of tribalism. Nigeria survived as the homeland of Hausa, Ibo and Yoruba peoples and of many smaller ethnicities, but the heady expectations of independence were gone. The indigenous talent and resources remain.

When I arrived in 1966, Nigeria’s population was estimated to be 50 million. Today that estimate is 240 million. One could say the country has done well. I would say, yes, but so much better was possible.

Chinua Achebe published his novel Things Fall Apart in 1958. It is a story of Ibo village life at the turn of the 20th century, when leadership went to village strong men who risked loss of influence, even death, for moral or physical weakness. “The White Man” arrived with Christian missionaries who carried an opposing message: faith, community, love, moral guidance; a message that pushes the strong man aside. The resulting confrontation produces a standoff between tradition and revelation that ends in tragedy (the suicide of the strong man) and a leadership vacuum filled by a rebellious son who lives on to father the hero of Achebe’s next novel, No Longer at Ease (1960). So, things fell apart and horror prevailed as Yeats’ poem describes. Like the poem, the novel tells of the horrific consequences of a clash of civilizations.

Yeats wrote his poem in 1922 when the world was besieged by the chaos, destruction and calamitous forces let loose by WWI, the Easter Rising in Ireland and the Russian Revolution. The poem is full of dread for the future, blame for those responsible and abject pessimism for a path forward.

Are we at such a juncture today? Our constitutional republic and its rule of law is gravely threatened, as I have been saying in these pages for several months. The threat comes from a theory of a “unitary executive” interwoven in Article II of the Constitution. This theory has no textual basis in the Constitution and no legal precedent in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence. It would give the president the power to make law as well as execute it. In the fevered atmosphere of right-wing politics this theory lives, like states’ rights, as a lever to lift the Constitution off its foundation. 

On the day of my arrival in Nigeria, the tension in the country was palpable. My London-Lagos flight was met on arrival at 3 a.m. by armed soldiers who conducted an hours-long inspection of luggage, papers and passports. The news of that day was that a military coup had occurred; the president, an Ibo, had been deposed and ethnic killings of Ibos were occurring throughout the country. 

The next morning, I had my first meeting with the students who had registered to take my contract law class. A roll call produced the unsettling result that of the 25 to 30 registrants, all six to eight Ibos were missing. The local newspaper headline banner shouted the news that a massacre of Ibos was taking place. My remaining students reported that no Ibos remained on campus. They had all left for their homeland in the Eastern Region.

This is where I first read Things Fall Apart. As a privileged American bringing legal instruction to the heirs to independence from British rule, I did not recognize or immediately relate to a connection between the 1958 novel and the Yeats poem, but Achebe certainly did. 

In his 1992 introduction to Achebe’s work, NYU professor Kwame Anthony Appiah led with the excerpt from the Yeats poem. The relevance to our chaotic time today jumps off the page. It is the relevance of bridging differences or suffering bad consequences. The center will not hold unless we shore it up with our voices.