Things Fall Apart was written as an argument. Most people who have read it know the story — Okonkwo, the clan, the missionaries, the collapse. Fewer people hold the full context of why Achebe wrote it: he read Heart of Darkness and was offended. Not in the way that produces a letter to a newspaper. In the way that produces a novel.

Conrad gave the world a portrait of Africa as background. Darkness. Incomprehensibility. A place without interiority, without organised thought, without the structures that constitute a civilisation worth examining. Africans in Heart of Darkness are not characters. They are atmosphere. Achebe looked at that book, which was being taught in universities as a masterpiece of literature, and wrote a direct rebuttal. He gave Igbo society its interiority back. He showed the laws, the values, the disputes, the wrestling matches, the gods, the way decisions were made, the way power was distributed, the way a man like Okonkwo was possible — admirable and flawed in the specific ways that require a full culture to produce.

Things Fall Apart is one of the most successful acts of literary counter-narrative in the twentieth century. It sold over twenty million copies. It is taught across the world. It cracked Conrad’s authority on the question of what Africa was.

And now the film version of this act of counter-narrative is being produced by a British production company.

Things Fall Apart is one of the most successful acts of literary counter-narrative in the twentieth century. The film version is being produced by the culture it was written against. That is worth sitting with.

1. The economics of film are not neutral

I am not saying the film will be bad. I am not saying Idris Elba — who is connected to the project and who I have watched be excellent in multiple things — will mishandle it. I am raising a prior question: who holds the budget controls the framing, and the budget is in British hands.

This matters because framing is not something you add at the end of production. Framing is in the decisions about which scenes make it in, which character relationships get screen time, which aspects of Igbo culture are explained to a presumed audience that does not already know them, which aspects are allowed to simply exist without explanation. Every one of those decisions is made by someone. Who that someone reports to, who that someone is trying to please, which market they are primarily making the film for — all of that shapes the finished product.

The market for this film, in the economic logic of a British production company, is global. Which means it is primarily Western. Which means the explanatory scaffolding, the emotional register, the moral framing — all of it will be calibrated to land with an audience that comes to the story from the outside. The same outside position that Achebe was pushing back against when he wrote the book.

I am not claiming this is conscious. I am not claiming anyone in the production is setting out to undermine Achebe’s work. I am saying the structural incentive exists. And structures produce outcomes regardless of intentions.

2. What Achebe thought about this

Achebe was not naive about the politics of storytelling. He wrote extensively about it. His essays in “Morning Yet on Creation Day” are a direct examination of the relationship between African literature, African writers, and the Western publishing and academic establishment that controlled the platforms through which African stories reached global audiences.

His argument — made carefully and with evidence — was that even well-intentioned Western engagement with African stories tends to flatten them. Not because of malice, but because the Western interpretive framework does not have the granular cultural literacy to hold the full complexity of what the stories are doing. Nuance gets sanded. The moral universe of a culture the audience does not know gets simplified to binary categories — hero, villain, victim, savage, noble — that the original work was specifically designed to resist.

Achebe was worried about this when the audience was just readers in Western classrooms. The stakes are higher with a film. A film is not mediated by a reader’s imagination. The director’s vision is what you see. There is no space for the audience to fill in what the book leaves open. Every ambiguity in the text becomes a production decision. Someone decides what Umuofia looks like. Someone decides how the gods sound. Someone decides what register Okonkwo’s silences carry. Those decisions will be made by people who did not grow up inside anything resembling Igbo cosmology.

3. What it means that it took this long

Things Fall Apart was published in 1958. The film is being made in the 2020s. That is a sixty-year gap between one of the most celebrated novels in world literature and its adaptation. No comparably successful and culturally significant Western novel would wait sixty years for a film adaptation.

Part of the answer is economic. African film markets have not historically had the capital to produce adaptations at the scale that a story like this demands. Nollywood — and this is said with genuine respect for what Nollywood has built with limited resources — operates in a financial register that makes a wide-release, high-production-value period film about pre-colonial Igbo society extremely difficult to execute. The infrastructure, the visual effects pipeline, the costume and location budgets — the numbers require Hollywood or British film financing.

A sixty-year gap between one of the most celebrated novels in world literature and its film adaptation. No comparably successful Western novel would wait sixty years.

So the economics forced a choice: the adaptation happens under Western financial control, or it does not happen. Achebe himself understood this for most of his life. He reportedly turned down a number of adaptation offers before his death in 2013. He was particular about who was handling his work and how. The fact that it is now moving forward, with his estate’s involvement, suggests that the people closest to his work have decided that the risk is worth it.

I respect that decision. I also think the rest of us are allowed to watch it carefully.

4. Who tells African stories and why it matters

There is a version of this conversation that gets dismissed as gatekeeping — the suggestion that only Africans should tell African stories. That is not my argument. My argument is more specific: the conditions under which African stories get told shape what those stories say, and those conditions have historically not been favourable.

We are at a moment where Nollywood is growing, where African streaming originals are reaching global audiences, where African directors and writers are gaining traction in international markets. This is genuinely new. The infrastructure for African storytelling with African financial independence is being built in real time.

The Things Fall Apart film arrives in the middle of that transition. It is being made by the old model — Western financing, Western production company — for one of the most important African stories ever written. That tension is not resolved by saying “representation matters” or by pointing to Idris Elba’s involvement. The tension is structural. It deserves to be named.

The conditions under which African stories get told shape what those stories say. That is not gatekeeping. That is history.

Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart so that a specific story would be told correctly. The irony of the film’s production context does not negate the importance of the adaptation. But it does add a responsibility — on the filmmakers, on the critics, and on us as the audience the story was originally for — to watch carefully and say clearly what we see.

If it is done well, it will be a gift. If it sands down the edges Achebe sharpened over sixty-seven years of writing and thinking and pushing back, we will know. And we should say so.