Things Fall Apart, with its thick and complex and rich representation of traditional village life, especially its central/centering rituals, sensibilities, and orientation, opens a window onto a world with a particular type of collective consciousness and politics and dynamics. In this chapter the Umuofia village in what we know today as Nigeria is introduced as the semi-fictional setting for the ongoing dynamics of a socially complex and richly textured society of local customs and traditions. Among these traditions is the masking ritual and the gendered, class, and interpersonal relations that it reflects and structures. Set at the end of the nineteenth century, at the height of the consolidations of the colonial era, Achebe’s story offers us an honest and realistic picture of a black world that represents a particular orientation to the world, a sensibility and mood, an epistemic system, including a certain felt anxiety and fear, symbolized by and managed through the mask worn in rituals.