It was not the story of the twins that won my modest appreciation of Things Fall Apart. They were history and that was a transformative point in Nwoye's life. 

It was not Okonkwo, or the death of Ikemefuna. Although it pricks the conscience with salient points I would nudge aside at midnight.

Tell me about Idemili and of weeping gods, and I would charge you by them to hold the reins of the old world.

But, it was the tumultuous life of a waiting backcloth. Flickering will and feeble hands. Lion hearts that shuddered like the shriveled skin of the aged. Men who rang war up at dawn, and blamed him for the butchered body.

Very often, we gather stones, only to blame those who broke the glass window using the same stones. Such was Okonkwo, a man like us, the children.

Children nursed by prating fathers, and western moms. Youths who stared and stirred helplessly for far too long they finally dared the wrath of the gods. The ones who could not watch a stranger cuff their wrists and became fugitives in their own fatherland. Children who dared to dream.

Okonkwo was a hero of his own. The kind some do not approve, but who existed anyway...so we may understand how sooner the mighty are fallen, in a bid to make a whole new world for underserving backcloths.

And because we've learnt from him how lonely that path becomes, we must learn to bury the hatchet.

In memory of Chinua Achebe.