When Everything You Are Becomes Obsolete
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe | Tuesday, January 13, 2026, 8pm UK
In this gap between festivities I wanted to tee up our first discussion of the new year in a couple of weeks - Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe - a cornerstone of modern African fiction.
Okonkwo is everything pre-colonial Igbo society honours: a warrior, a man of achievement, someone who has risen from absolute nothing because his father was nothing. He is strong, industrious, respected. By every metric that matters, he has won.
Then colonizers arrive, and his entire value system becomes worthless overnight.
What Achebe captures is the moment when strength becomes irrelevant, when standing firm feels like the only honourable choice and also the path to destruction.
Achebe’s 1958 novel is narrated from inside Igbo society as British colonialism arrives in 1890s Nigeria. It doesn’t romanticize pre-colonial Africa or endorse colonialism. Instead, it asks something harder: What happens to a community when external forces systematically dismantle their institutions? What does it cost to stay human—to preserve what matters—when everything changes?
For leaders navigating organizational or societal transformation, Okonkwo’s story is unsparing. What strengths become liabilities? When does conviction become rigidity? How do we distinguish between standing on principle and refusing reality?
These are big questions - let’s discuss them!
When: Tuesday, January 13, 2026, 8pm UK time
Duration: 60 minutes
Where: Zoom (link will be in the calendar invite)
Sign up here - You’ll receive a calendar invite and additional resources directly to your email
Context for our spring reading
We’re exploring Living Through Historical Transformation this spring—three books, three different angles on how individuals and communities navigate when the ground shifts beneath them. Things Fall Apart opens that conversation by showing transformation imposed from outside. If you’re joining us for all three books, they deepen each other in unexpected ways.
Resources to Get Started
BBC Audio: Achebe’s Revolutionary Book (9 min) — Achebe’s daughter on how this novel changed world literature
Achebe on Why Africa Must Tell Its Own Stories (15 min) — Reflecting 50 years later on what he set out to accomplish
1964 Interview with Achebe (23 min) — Speaking with Wole Soyinka just six years after publication
LitCharts Study Guide — Chapter-by-chapter companion if you want structured support while reading
Questions? Do get in touch…
Looking forward to diving in together with you!
Richard @ Not Another Book Club