Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1)

by Chinua Achebe

People laughed at him because he was a loafer, and they swore never to lend him any more money because he never paid back. But Unoka was such a man that he always succeeded in borrowing more, and piling up his debts.

But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father.

Unoka was like that in his last days. His love of talk had grown with age and sickness. It tried Okonkwo’s patience beyond words.

A man’s life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.

But apart from the church, the white men had also brought a government.

We have brought a peaceful administration to you and your people so that you may be happy.

They had broken into tumult instead of action.

One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate.