Things Fall Apart and the Pedagogy of Adichie’s Single Story

Abstract

This essay undertakes a critical examination of the epistemological and pedagogical risks and rewards of teaching Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in American secondary schools. I consider these issues from several different viewpoints. Recent research suggests that American students receive little if any information about Africa in school, but Things Fall Apart has been a staple of the American English Language Arts classroom since at least the 1970s, and is typically the only African literature taught in American public schools. I examine what is at stake if Achebe’s novel provides young Americans their only sustained encounter with information about Africa during their primary and secondary school years. I approach my analysis from two different but related critical perspectives. I lean on Achebe himself, and on his essay about why he wrote Things Fall Apart, in order to think about whether the novel, standing alone in the American secondary curriculum, accomplishes what its author hoped it might — the humanizing of African people in order to contravene racist depictions of the continent in Western literature. I also work from Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk about the “danger of a single story”, in which she asserts that fictional texts convey “cultural power”, shaping global understandings of local places. The essay critiques several Things Fall Apart unit plans devised by American secondary teachers, both to provide insight into how the novel has been presented to Americans, and to support my thesis that Things Fall Apart may reinforce rather than redress American assumptions about Africa.

Keywords:

• pedagogy
• humanities
• Chinua Achebe
• Chimamanda Adichie
• teaching
• English Language Arts K-12
• philosophy of teaching
• Africa
• African history
• public schools