Hello friends!
Welcome to the MA Podcast 2024 Edition! As I explained in the intro episode (which was an opportunity to vibe to the MA theme song composed by yours truly), we’ll spend this year exploring how to make MA happen without the winds of X/Twitter filling the sails. What that means is that these weekly podcast episodes, the monthly YouTube episodes, and quarterly blog posts will be the main way we communicate.
For the month of January, we will be looking at folktales in modern African literature and where better to start than with Chinua Achebe, the Igwe himself? Even more, we’re starting with a story about Igwe (which means “Sky” in Igbo) nestled in a story about an Igwe, Chief Okonkwo of Umuofia.
We read The Story of the Vulture and the Sky, a folktale of planetary beef, which is one of five folktales woven into the narrative of “Things Fall Apart”, Chinua Achebe’s debut novel published in 1958. The novel chronicles the life of Okonkwo, an Igbo chief and champion wrestler whose world crumbles as his traditionalist community is radically changed by European missionaries.
Of the 5 folktales woven into the narrative of Things Fall Apart, three (The Story of the Vulture and the Sky, Leaves and the Snake-Lizard and Mother Kite and Daughter Kite) are found in chapter seven. The Story of Mosquito and the Ear is found in chapter nine and The Story of How Tortoise Got His Bumpy Shell in chapter eleven. By including these stories in his book, Chinua Achebe ensured that the oral traditions of his people, whose continuity was under threat by the changes that colonialism was bringing, stayed in circulation.
The modern African writer is to his indigenous oral tradition as a snail is to its shell. Even in a foreign habitat, a snail never leaves its shell behind. – Solomon O. Iyasere
If you can’t get enough, click here for a detailed but not too long analysis of folktales in Things Fall Apart.
I hope you enjoy the episode!
Igbo Folktales in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart