Key Figures

Frederick Lugard was the British military officer and colonial administrator who built the governing framework of colonial Nigeria. After service in India, Egypt, and East Africa, he was appointed High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria in 1900. His signature contribution to British colonial policy — the doctrine of indirect rule — was designed to govern a vast territory with minimal British presence, working through existing local authority rather than deploying officials throughout the interior.

In the hierarchical Islamic north, this worked reasonably well. In the acephalous Igbo south — a society with no kings and no chiefs to rule through — it produced the warrant-chief disaster: the British simply appointed men as "chiefs," inventing an authority that Igbo society had never granted. In 1914 Lugard amalgamated the northern and southern protectorates into a single Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria, enclosing peoples with no historical relationship — and in some cases old enmities — inside a unity that was a British administrative fiction. He served as Governor-General until 1919. He remains one of the most consequential, and most controversial, figures of British colonial Africa.

Joyce Cary was a British novelist who served as a colonial administrator in Nigeria from 1913 to 1920. His 1939 novel Mister Johnson — set in colonial Nigeria, with a Nigerian protagonist who enthusiastically embraces British colonial culture — was widely praised in Britain as a sympathetic, humanizing portrait of an African.

Achebe, who read it as a student at Ibadan, found it deeply condescending. In Cary's novel, Mister Johnson's devotion to his white employer — and his ultimate willingness to be killed by him — were meant to move the reader. To Achebe they represented the precise failure of imagination he set out to correct: the inability to grant an African character a full interior life, genuine agency, and the right to be the subject rather than the object of his own story. Cary does not appear in Things Fall Apart. But the tradition he stands for — British literature about Africa, written by British people who had been to Africa yet could not see it on its own terms — is exactly what Achebe was writing against.

Thomas John Dennis was a British Anglican missionary who came to Nigeria in 1894 and spent the rest of his life there. By every account he was a man of genuine commitment and considerable ability: he learned Igbo, published a grammar and a literacy primer, and undertook the immense labor of translating the entire Bible into a language he had adopted as his own. He died in 1917 when the ship carrying him home was torpedoed by a German submarine; a suitcase holding a draft of his Igbo–English dictionary washed up on a Welsh beach, where a fisherman dried the pages and returned them.

The Igbo language has many dialects, some barely mutually intelligible. To produce a single Bible, Dennis and a committee of Igbo assistants assembled, from 1906, a constructed written form he called "Union Igbo" — and because the missionaries controlled the schools, it became the standard taught across Igboland. Achebe was blunt about the result: the standard version, he said, "cannot sing… It's heavy. It's wooden. It doesn't go anywhere." The living dialects he grew up hearing were orally rich; the written form available to him belonged to no organic tradition. His decision to write in English was partly a response to that loss. He extended the charge to the scholars who codified modern Standard Igbo in 1973, calling them "disciples of Dennis."