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1.A person, place, or object through which a community believes the gods or ancestors speak; in Igbo society, the oracle of the hills and caves gives judgment on disputes; from the story: “yams and kin and the oracle” — listed among what makes Umuofia a complete world rather than a location.
6.Relating to the period after colonialism, or to literature from formerly colonised countries that reclaims perspective from within; from the story: “It was postcolonial in its bones — meaning it was already sophisticated, already complete, before any outside power arrived to say otherwise.”
8.A root vegetable and staple crop across West Africa; in Things Fall Apart, the cultivation of yam is the test of a man’s place in the community; from the story: “yams and kin” — named beside kinship, ritual, and the oracle, as one of the marks of an indigenous system that worked.
9.A short, traditional saying that expresses a general truth or practical wisdom; Achebe’s prose is dense with Igbo proverbs because they are the daily language of character in Umuofia; from the story: “the way the elders speak in proverb” — the elders’ authority is built on this shared, inherited language.
10.Masked ancestral spirits of the Igbo people who, during rituals, are believed to speak for the ancestors and pass judgment on matters of dispute; from the story: “the masked ancestral spirits — what we call the egwugwu — gather to judge what the village has done.” When the mask is struck off in Chapter 20, the spiritual system beneath is exposed as ordinary men — and broken.
11.A set of connected parts that work together as a whole; from the story: “a system built around a place” — and from the excerpt: when the egwugwu’s mask is struck off, it is the system that defines a place that collapses, not the place itself.
12.Family relationship, or the close bond between people who share a common origin or place; from the story: “the kinship, the rituals you do at planting and harvest” — Achebe renders the Igbo kinship structure as one of the foundations that holds Umuofia together.
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2.The practice of one country or people taking political and economic control of another people or place; from the story: “And then the colonials come. That is what the book is about.” In Things Fall Apart, British colonialism arrives with a court, a road, and a religion — and dismantles the indigenous system in three generations.
3.Originating naturally in a particular place; belonging to a place from the beginning, before any outside system; from the story: “a system arriving on top of an indigenous one” — the Igbo way is named first, not as an addition to colonial history but as the place that was already there.
4.A repeated, formal action performed according to a community’s tradition; from the story: “the rituals you do at planting and harvest” — rituals are the visible marks of a system: the things people do, day after day, that bind them to a place.
5.The act of forcing someone or something out of its usual place; from the story: “Displacement is not always a foot on a neck. Sometimes it is a court, and a messenger who arrives in trousers.” This term names what happens when a new system arrives and makes the old place unreadable.
7.A story, or the way events are told and understood; from the story: “This was a narrative being repeated, with different actors, on a different scale.” Achebe’s project is to give Africa a narrative told by Africans — and, the narrator argues, by people inside any place being written over.