THE BOOKS THAT CHANGE WITH ME: Why I keep Rereading.
First Encounters with Things Fall Apart: A Naive Reading
I first read Things Fall Apart during my secondary school years, somewhere between rushed homework and cramming for final exams. I majored in literature at the advanced level, so Achebe’s novel wasn’t an option but mandatory. A box to check. A syllabus to survive. Back then, I didn’t see it as anything special. It was just another long book standing between me and passing a grade. We were expected to read it, understand it, memorize the themes and characters, and sit for an exam that would measure our worth through structured essay questions. '“Analyze the character of Okonkwo.” “ Discuss the impact of colonialism on Igbo society.” It wasn’t about falling in love with the story but more about preparing for battle with the marking scheme. Naturally, I approached the novel with the enthusiasm of someone cleaning their room because they were told to. It wasn’t my choice. It wasn’t a book I found on a rainy day and couldn’t put down. It was homework and in that spirit, I treated it like a chore.
Okonkwo, the fierce and rigid protagonist, seemed to me like just another difficult African parent. The kind you tiptoe around to avoid setting off their temper. Stubborn, obsessed with tradition, quick to anger. I couldn’t understand why he was so determined to fight against change, why he clung so tightly to old ways when new and seemingly better ones were arriving. At that age, Christianity and colonialism didn’t feel like the monsters Achebe was trying to paint. If anything, they seemed like upgrades. Missionaries were building schools, offering education, teaching people to read and write. Hospitals were being introduced. Roads and better ways of living were becoming available. To my young mind, all of it felt progressive, helpful and even necessary.
Why, I wondered, would anyone resist that? Why wouldn’t you welcome a faith that preached forgiveness instead of fear? Why hold on so tightly to old customs that, to me, seemed rigid, even cruel?
At the time, I thought Things Fall Apart was just a story about a man who refused to adapt and paid the price for it. A man whose pride ruined him. I didn’t see the tragedy yet. I didn’t hear the grief buried under Achebe’s words.
Not yet.
Reading Things Fall Apart Again: Seeing with Older Eyes
The second time I picked up Things Fall Apart was a few years ago, far away from home.I stumbled across it in a small, tucked-away bookstore in Dubai. The moment felt strangely nostalgic—as if an old friend I hadn’t seen in years had suddenly appeared across a crowded room. Without thinking twice, I bought it and carried it home like something precious. When I sat down to reread it, the story unfolded differently. It wasn’t just about Okonkwo anymore but about the world.
The older you get, the more you realize how easily society traps you in a role, how quickly it demands that you become something manageable, something predictable. And yet, there’s a cruel irony: if you fight too hard against the system, you get punished. But if you surrender completely, you still lose yourself. It’s a catch-22. The same catch-22 that swallowed Okonkwo whole. He wasn’t just stubborn for the sake of stubbornness. He was a man caught between two worlds, one crumbling, the other rising and he had no tools to navigate the change. What Okonkwo needed wasn’t brute resistance but strategy. He needed to learn the new system, study its movements, and figure out how to survive without losing his soul.
Today, I see that survival, real survival, isn’t about trying to beat the systems stacked against us. You can’t beat them. But you also can’t surrender completely, because then you stop being yourself. The real path, which is the harder path is to understand the structures: religion, government, insurance or society itself. To see them clearly. To recognize how they prey on human weakness. And then to live outside them as much as you can possibly dare, without being naive to their power or seduced by their promises.
Living Between Two Worlds
Living in Dubai has sharpened these realizations for me in ways I never expected. Leaving Uganda meant stepping out of my familiar world, out of my language, out of everything that quietly told me who I was. When I first arrived, I realized most of the people around me barely spoke English and back home speaking good, polished English was a mark of intelligence, even social worth. It was a status symbol. In Uganda, your fluency could open doors or quietly close them. But in Dubai, all that melted away.English was just another tool for getting by or proof of anything deeper which made me look back and take pride in my mother tongue, a language of my ancestors, the language that held our values, our humor, our way of seeing the world. I began to realize how much beauty, wisdom, and soul we package into our traditional languages, how they carry ways of thinking that English can’t always hold.
The Wisdom of Tradition
In many African traditions, a child isn’t just raised by two parents; they’re raised by a whole village. Every adult is responsible. Every elder earns respect by virtue of being older, wiser or simply by carrying the weight of survival longer. This kind of upbringing teaches you humility. It teaches you to see yourself as part of a bigger story, not the center of it. Today, looking around at fractured communities and shallow relationships, I realize how important that communal upbringing was and still is for raising morally grounded, resilient human beings. Even the way we treat language reflects deeper values because where I grew up, curse words weren’t casual. They weren’t thrown around like filler in conversations. Language had weight and words could bless or poison. In many African traditions, speaking carelessly wasn’t just bad manners but a moral failure and a reflection of your heart and sometimes I wonder how differently we’d treat each other if we still believed that words have consequences beyond the moment they’re spoken.
A Deeper Spirituality
And then there’s religion. Reading Things Fall Apart again made me rethink how I view faith and belief altogether because it’s easy to get trapped into belonging to a label: Christian, Muslim, Traditionalist, Buddhist but true spirituality and spiritual intelligence, is something deeper.
It’s the quiet ability to recognize the sacred in yourself and others, without needing a building or a title to validate it.
Today, I understand that real worth isn’t found in how loudly you declare a religion, but in how silently and humbly you carry your faith through life.
That’s something no colonizer, no missionary, no modern government can give you—or take away.
It’s something that survives the fall.
Does the Story Change, or Do We?
The first time I read Things Fall Apart, I was too young to understand that a broken world isn’t just something you see but something you live through. I thought Okonkwo was stubborn. I thought change was simple. I thought survival meant picking the winning side. But life, like Achebe’s story, is more complicated than that.
You don’t just choose.
You endure.
You bend without breaking.
You lose pieces of yourself and somehow find others you didn’t know you had.
When I read the book again, years later, it wasn’t the story that had changed but rather me and Achebe had always been telling the truth. I just hadn’t lived enough of it yet. Maybe that’s what the best stories do:
They wait for you to catch up
