Chinua Achebe – “Things Fall Apart” (ch. 4 – the end)

The planting season begins and Okonkwo spends his time preparing seed yams. Ikemefuna and Nwoye help him by fetching baskets of yams and putting them in the piles of four hundred pieces. Okonkwo tries to teach them about the proper preparation of seed yams, but his own insecurities (a man is supposed to be a provider for his family and Okonkwo is scared his son is going to take after his grandfather) make him the worst possible teacher, who keeps on criticizing and threatening. After that, the whole family goes to plant yams and then tends to them, which is a hard job, because yams are very demanding. Then the rain season comes, raining so hard that even the village rain-maker would not attempt to stop it, because it would endanger his health, just like trying to make rain in the middle of dry season. It’s a welcome time of respite between the labour of planting and planting of harvest. Children can sit around fires, roast maize, and tell stories. Ikemefuna misses his family less and less, and he becomes best friends with Nwoye, who loves his stories, and, as the narrative tells us in a moment of prolepsis, he’s going to remember the time they spent together until the end of his life. (It’s also a subtle ominous signal, because why aren’t we told about Ikemefuna’s memories?)