Things Fall Apart is called the greatest African novel. Seven decades of praise have been aimed at the wrong half of the book. Every Nigerian classroom met it. Every exam answer stops at the same place: Okonkwo's pride, Okonkwo's fall, the strong man broken by a changing world. The tragedy gets called the masterpiece. The actual masterpiece is the last page, and it is on nobody's syllabus. A British District Commissioner arrives, looks at Okonkwo's body, and values the whole life at one reasonable paragraph. The book he is writing will be titled The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. The greatest African novel ends with a colonial officer editing an African life down to a footnote inside his own story. The praise stopped at the hanging. The paragraph was the point. @RallyOnChain, which classic did school force on you, and which part did nobody actually read?